essay on changing trends in family and social values

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Family Change in Global Perspective: How and Why Family Systems Change

Author Note

Changes in family systems that have occurred over the past half century throughout the Western world are now spreading across the globe to nations that are experiencing economic development, technological change, and shifts in cultural beliefs. Traditional family systems are adapting in different ways to a series of conditions that forced shifts in all Western nations. In this paper, I examine the causes and consequences of global family change, introducing a recently funded project using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and U.S. Census Bureau data to chart the pace and pattern of changes in marriage and family systems in low- and middle-income nations.

Global Family Changes

I still vividly recall from my graduate student days at Columbia University more than a half century ago noted sociologist William J. Goode strutting around the lecture hall complaining that we do not have a good general theory about why and how family systems are changing globally. Of course, he didn’t use the term “globally” explicitly because the word was not yet in fashion. In the mid-1960s, Goode made the theoretical argument that there would be a transformation in family systems around the world, from longstanding traditional forms to the “conjugal household.” With this term he was suggesting that family systems around the world would eventually converge with the Western model of the nuclear family—comprised of a married couple and their children in a single household, rather than multigenerational or complex households. Goode contended that the conjugal family was most compatible with the growth of market capitalism and a job-based economy. Consequently, he speculated that the Western system would eventually spread across the globe. Evidence of rapid economic growth and the development of a modern economy that have come to be called “globalism” had already moved beyond the West in the early post-War era to parts of Asia, just as Goode was completing his book World Revolution and Family Patterns (1963), which contained data from 50 countries and analyzed the impact of family on societies.

In what became a classic analysis of change in family systems, Goode (1963) assembled a large array of extant data describing recent patterns in a number of the world’s regional family systems. He convincingly demonstrated that over time, traditional agricultural-based economies and the family systems to which they had given rise were being undermined by the growth of job-based economies and the spread of Western ideas. At the same time, family patterns that had been in place around the globe were yielding to more Western-style practices such as the growing expectation of strong marital bonds, lower fertility, and fewer intergenerational households.

Goode (1963) argued that the Western family system had changed to fit (adapt to) an economy that increasingly required more education and geographical mobility. These changes in turn would erode the authority of family elders and reduce their formal control over their children, he asserted. Modern family systems in the West, he predicted, would initiate free mate choice based on compatibility and sentiment rather than on family interests or parental control. Finally, he showed that these modern features of Western family systems were being adopted in many regions of the world in the aftermath of the World War II.

Had Goode (1963) been able to imagine the revolution in gender roles that was also just on the horizon, he might have pointed to it as another major change in family systems. However, he was largely unable to foresee the events of the next several decades whereby the gender-based division of labor still observed in the West in the 1960s would give way to a growing demand for gender equality, although he hinted at this possibility (see Cherlin, 2012 ; Furstenberg, 2013 ). More recently, some theorists have examined the weakening of gender stratification as an independent source of family adaptation to economic growth ( Esping-Andersen, 2009 ; Esping-Andersen & Billari, 2015 ; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegard, 2015 ; McDonald, 2000 ).

Nonetheless, Goode’s masterwork (1963) influenced the writing of the next generation of sociologists and demographers who studied global and regional patterns of change in family systems. Although his theoretical perspective included the possibility that ideational change (i.e., a shift in cultural values) might precede or follow structural changes in family systems, a number of theorists, in response, emphasized and even prioritized the importance of value change through social diffusion (e.g., see Coale & Watkins, 1986 ; Hendi, 2017 ; Johnson-Hanks et al., 2011 ; Watkins, 1990 ) Just as Max Weber (1905) argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism more than a century earlier, these theorists have argued that culture is an independent influence on changing preferences for individual choice, a value set that is often seen as an export from the West. However, researchers— Caldwell, 1976 ; Inglehart, 1990 ; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn, 1988 ; Thornton, 2001 ; Van de Kaa, 1987 ; among others—have challenged the underlying assumption of economic determinism that they saw in Goode’s theory.

In a book on changing family systems titled Between Sex and Power: Family in the World —in some sense a sequel to Goode’s (1963) book from 40 years earlier— Therborn (2004) argued for the separate influence of law and public policy as an independent institutional driver of change both in the developed and developing worlds. Others have pointed to the potentially causal influence of changing demographic pressures owing to declines in mortality and fertility that prompted changes in the timing of life events such as marriage and childbearing ages ( Bianchi, 2014 ; Bongaarts, 2015 ; Bongaarts, Mensch, & Blanc, 2017 ; Hertrich, 2017 ). Along the same line, reproductive technology has brought about new possibilities in the timing and organization of the life course, indicating that technology can also have an independent influence on change in family patterns ( Golombok et al. 1995 ; Inhorn, Birenbaum, & Carneli, 2008 ).

These broad theories of why and how family systems change have stimulated a sizeable body of national and regional studies on patterns of family change throughout the world ( Allendorf & Pandian, 2016 ; Amador, 2016 ; Cuesta, Rios-Salas, & Meyer, 2017 ; Kumagai, 2010 ; Kuo & Raley, 2016 ; Seltzer, 2004 ; Seltzer et al., 2005 ; Thornton et al., 2014 ; etc.). Yet, it is still fair to say that since the publication of Goode’s (1993) book more than a half century ago, there has been no systematic attempt to test in the broadest sense his theory of how change in family systems occurs or the competing explanations that have been advanced in response to his bold predictions using demographic data on a global scale.

Nonetheless, the idea of a growing convergence in fertility patterns has become a major topic of inquiry among demographers and economists ( Casterline & National Research Council, 2001 ; Coleman, 2002 ; Crenshaw, Christenson, & Oakey, 2000 ; Dorius, 2008 ; Hendi, 2017 ; Rindfuss, Choe, & Brauner-Otto, 2016 ; Wilson, 2001 , 2011 ). Even taking account of this distinct line of research, a broader investigation of how and why family systems change over time, much less the systematic testing of Goode’s broad theory and the responses to it, has been stymied by the absence of comparable data on global family systems. The availability of such data would permit the empirical examination of competing explanations of the transformation of family systems in response to economic, cultural, social, demographic, and political change.

This paper examines some of the issues that must be addressed before family scholars can develop and test theoretical explanations for why and how family systems change. I begin by enumerating the major changes that have occurred in families across the globe, before introducing a conceptual framework for investigating why change is coming about more rapidly in some regions of the world than in others. After describing why systems are changing, I turn to a particular feature of the change: growing patterns of inequality that are being generated by diverging family patterns across social class strata. Finally, I conclude by describing an ongoing project through which colleagues and I are assembling extensive and reliable data to study these issues.

Worldwide Changing Family Practices

Broadly speaking, it is easy to argue that some degree of convergence in family patterns worldwide, as presented below, has already occurred, particularly if the terrain is restricted to marriage and fertility, although researchers have noted continuing evidence of heterogeneity as well ( Holland, 2017 ; Pesando & the GFC team, in press ).

• The age at first marriage has been rising in most nations of the world ( Jones & Yeung, 2014 ). This pattern was evident in Western Europe and English-speaking countries during the latter third of the last century and has continued into the present ( Stevenson & Wolfers, 2007 ). It is now evident that similar changes have occurred more recently in virtually all countries in Eastern Europe, large areas of East Asia (with some important exceptions. such as much of India, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam), and part of Africa and Latin America ( Bongaarts, Mensch, & Blanc, 2017 ; García & de Oliveira, 2011 ; Harwood-Lejeune, 2001 ; Raymo et al., 2015 ). Although not uniform, the pattern is sufficiently widespread to lead most researchers to conclude that the institution of marriage is undergoing profound changes in most parts of the world in response to economic and social change ( Cherlin, 2012 ).
• The rise in the age at first marriage is just one reason for the general decline in fertility that has occurred worldwide except in rural Africa and parts of the Middle East ( Bongaarts, 1978 ; Casterline, 2017 ; Madsen, Moslehi, & Wang, 2018 ). As I have already noted, marriage at a later age typically implies less family influence on the choice of partner and perhaps a growth in heterogamous unions, at least initially, as individuals have more options to form families of their own choosing, including remaining single. This pattern has increased in most nations, especially where females have entered the labor force in greater numbers ( Esteve, Garcia-Roman, & Permanyer, 2012 ; Harknett & Kuperberg, 2012). In some family systems, particularly in the economically advanced nations of East Asia, a growing fraction of women seem to be exercising their option to delay marriage indefinitely ( Furstenberg, 2013 ; Jones, 2005 ; Raymo et al., 2015 ). As in the West, marriage is apparently becoming more discretionary in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia ( Jones, Hull, & Mohamad, 2011 ; Thornton & Philipov, 2009 ).
• As marriage has become more optional, the practice of cohabitation (before, after, or in lieu of a formal union) has grown throughout the Western world and in Eastern Europe (Heuveline & Timberlake, 2004; Holland, 2017 ; Lundberg, Pollak, & Stearns, 2016 ; Thornton & Philipov, 2009 ). In many nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, where cohabitation has long been a preferred form among certain ethnic and racial minorities, it has become more widely practiced among more economically advantaged individuals who previously confined their unions to formal marriage ( Covre-Sussai et al., 2015 ; Esteve & Lesthaeghe, 2016 ; Esteve, Lesthaeghe, & Lopez-Gay, 2012 ; Lesthaeghe, 2014 ).
• Divorce after marriage has become more common in most nations, especially those with previously low rates of marital dissolution ( Surkyn & Lesthaeghe, 2004 ). While marital stability has increased in some countries among the most educated, it has declined at the same time for the less educated and skilled portion of the population ( Schwartz & Han, 2014 ). As marriage has moved to a more companionate form, divorce is increasingly viewed as an acceptable option for couples in unsatisfactory relationships (Goode, 1963; Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2004 ).
• A concomitant trend is the growth of childlessness in families in most wealthy nations, which is associated with declining fertility ( Kreyenfeld & Konietzka, 2017 ; Rowland, 2007 ). In a growing number of nations in Europe, the English-speaking nations, and the advanced economies of Asia such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, substantial proportions of women are electing not to have children (and often not to marry ( Jones, 2007 ). Living alone has become more common in many countries of the world as growing numbers of females have entered the labor force and opted not to marry ( Jones, 2005 ). Childlessness appears to be on the rise in East Asia and other rapidly developing parts of the globe.
• The rapid growth of women’s participation in the labor force in most developing and almost all developed nations has been accompanied by a change in men and women’s domestic roles ( Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegard, 2015 ; McDonald, 2000 ). In many nations, the ideology of gender equality may have grown faster than its actual practice. Nonetheless, throughout the developing and developed world, a push for women’s rights has meant that females now have far more access to education and labor market participation in the 21 st Century ( Duflo, 2012 ; Goldin, 2006 ). And, this trend is only likely to increase as women’s rights are enforced by changes in legal statutes and public policies. Moreover, spousal beating and sexual coercion have been identified as serious problems in countries that at one time legitimized these practices ( Yount, 2009 ).
• The weakening of the institution of marriage has been accompanied by a growing tolerance for premarital sexual behavior and out-of-wedlock childbearing ( Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2004 ). Although much of the non-marital childbearing is occurring within informal unions, the stability of non-marital unions with children is lower than marital unions with children ( Manning, Smock, & Majumdar, 2004 ). This particular trend may be contributing to the growing stratification in family systems between the advantaged and disadvantaged. The privileged are more likely to marry and have children after marriage, whereas those less well-off are having them before or outside of marriage, contributing to a perpetual economic and social disadvantage ( Kalil, 2015 ; Lundberg, Pollak, & Stearns, 2016 ; McLanahan, 2004 ). It is worth noting that in parts of the developing world, the pattern of consensual marriages has long existed, particularly in Latin America and the West Indies ( Esteve & Lesthaeghe, 2016 ).
• The stratification of family systems is both a cause and consequence of rising levels of inequality in most nations with advanced economies, and introduces profound differences in children’s opportunities. Among the educated, children are more often the products of intense investment; less educated parents often lack both the resources and the skills to prepare their children for a more demanding educational system in order to acquire the knowledge and skills needed today (Dronkens, Kalmijn & Wagner, 2006; Schneider, Hastings, & LaBriola, 2018 ). In all likelihood this pattern is appearing in developing nations ( Kalil, 2015 ; Pesando & the GFC team, in press ).
• Although preferences for intergenerational arrangements continue to prevail in some parts of the world, individuals forming families are increasingly less likely to reside in conjoint and complex households ( Ruggles & Heggeness, 2008 ). The decline of intergenerational households in some nations may also reflect the declining influence of the older generation; in at least some of these nations, there is concern that the elderly may lack traditional family support in later life ( Grundy, 2006 ; Taylor et al., 2018 ).

These trends in marriage and family do not generally occur singly as family systems change from agricultural-based to industrial- and post-industrial based economies. They typically evolve as interrelated changes that co-occur over time, although not necessarily in a predictable or orderly sequence of adaptations to exogenous changes in the economy, polity, technological advances, and alterations in the culture of a society. Demographers have referred to these related features as the second demographic transition ( Lesthaeghe, 2010 , 2014 ; McLanahan, 2004 ). By this they mean that family systems have become more governed by members’ individual preferences than by elders (especially males) who once assumed considerable authority to impose their will on the family as a collective system. As Therborn (2004) argued, the decline of patriarchy appears to be at the core of family system change, although it cannot be considered a cause of it in the strictest sense of the word. More accurately, as I assert in the next section, the changes are brought about by a host of factors that work in tandem to undermine the existing order that is often based on patriarchal expectations.

Why Change Occurs in Family Systems

The transformation of family systems in many regions of the world and in particular nations has been amply documented by demographers, sociologists, and economists cited earlier according to some of the trends just described, but this transformation has not been explained in a strict sense. It is clear that the development of a job-based economy is one of the central sources of change, much as Goode (1963) claimed a half century ago. However, economic development does not take place in isolation from broader societal changes, that is, institutional changes in education, health, law, and the spread of technology alter existing institutions and longstanding cultural assumptions ( Meyer et al., 1975 ).

To illustrate, I have borrowed a conceptual scheme that depicts some of the sources of social change from an ongoing research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is designed to examine this process in family systems across the globe and is being carried out by a team of scholars at the University of Pennsylvania, including Hans-Peter Kohler (Project Head), Luca Maria Pesando, Andres Castro, and collaborators in several European nations (see http://web.sas.upenn.edu/gfc ; Pesando & the GFC team, in press). Using data from the worldwide Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the Global Family Change (GFC) Project has extracted indicators of family change to identify patterns of change in low- and middle-income countries and test the processes by which family system change occurs (see Figure 1 ).

Determinants of Family Change.

In this research project, my colleagues and I make a fundamental assumption that alterations in family patterns can arise from societal adaptations to a number of different exogenous sources introduced into a society through parallel and often complementary processes. Change in family systems often comes about when transformations in macro-level conditions occur; the most important of these being the transition from a predominately traditional subsistence economy to a production-oriented economy transformed by its capacity to provide exports to agro-business, manufacturing, and industry. This transformation, much as Goode (1963) argued, creates or expands a job-based economy that favors younger and more geographically mobile individuals, including young and typically unmarried women. Economic development is typically centered in urban areas, implying a shift from a rural to an urban population, bringing about a loss of family control, especially when young people in cities often continue to support their kin financially in the countryside.

Such economic developments do not invariably go hand in hand with shifts in cultural expectations and practices, but it is not uncommon to see, especially among the young, a reorientation to more individually-determined lifestyles and a decline in social control by elders, and especially in men’s control of women ( Cherlin, 2012 ). Quite independently, economic development introduces new technologies ( Greenwood, 2019 ). The rapid spread of the use of computers and smart phones has stimulated a growth in the use of social media in developing nations, a powerful influence on younger persons who have quickly adopted these new forms of communication ( Pew Research Center, 2018 ). So, exposure to social influences begins to extend well beyond the family, village institutions, or even national political sources of opinion. Inevitably, peer-mediated contexts begin to hold more weight on public opinion, and the extended family system loses influence accordingly ( Allendorf, 2016 ; Bongaarts & Watkins, 1996 ; Cherlin, 2012 ).

Accompanying and preceding economic development also come alterations in existing political, social, and even religious institutions. The educational system becomes both a channel of mobility and in many nations a new way that families can maintain or achieve advantage if they choose to invest in their children’s long-term futures through schooling. The importance of schooling grows as it extends from primary to secondary institutions, and ultimately to tertiary education for the affluent and the talented. Education itself often presents a powerful counterweight to traditional practices both inside and outside the home, upsetting longstanding cultural understandings. For women, whose presence in secondary and tertiary education has grown to a majority in many countries, the impact of additional schooling can be transformative, eroding traditional gender norms and giving economic advantages to more educated women ( Esteve, Garcia-Roman, & Permanyer, 2012 ; Schwartz & Han, 2014 ).

In the polity and the public sphere, shifts in the opinions of economic and political elites often must take account of the changed economic status of women that comes with education and greater involvement in the labor market. Relatively little is known about the timing of broad institutional changes that bring about women’s greater involvement in the polity. And, lacking systematic data, little is known about how gender involvement in education and work plays out inside the family. Alternatively, changes within family systems may occur in response to cultural ideas about equality that travel through different routes such as mass and social media or come about because of legal or policy changes. Political leaders advocate and adopt new policies that often are imported from rich nations or more economically developed neighbors in the region ( Meyer, 1975 ; Watkins, 2001). New ideas and practices may be imported, but they are typically modified to suit the institutional structures in place and mediated by national traditions and culture that tailor and shape them to conform to existing cultural forms. New policy dilemmas arise in the process of economic development, with the dissemination of new forms of technology, and the spread of cultural ideas and information. Invariably, certain countries must support or ban new reproductive technologies, the content of Western movies and social media, and laws regulating same-sex marriage. Thus, disagreements over public policies related to these practices and issues can happen rapidly, and we suspect independently, of the level and pace of economic development.

It is wrong to assume that the process of economic and social development works invariably from the top down, with those having more education or resources always adopting new family patterns sooner than the rest of the population, but this flow from the well off to the less privileged often occurs ( Pesando & the GFC team, in press ). Changes can simultaneously occur at the macro, mezzo, and micro levels; values can and do change as individuals move from the countryside to the city, or leave their home countries to find work elsewhere ( Hu, 2016 ). Increases in migration to and from other nations are undoubtedly a source of new information, values, and daily practices. Ideas are promulgated through channels of mass and social media that promote educational advancement, individual fulfillment, or gender equality, undermining traditional family patterns sometimes even in nations that are lagging in economic advancement.

At the individual level, change occurs as people confront new and unfamiliar situations as they occur or, at least, are imaginable (such as going to a university, engaging in sex before marriage, or migrating to another country for employment). As Mills (1959) observed decades ago in The Sociological Imagination , cultural contradictions emerge in all societies experiencing change, that compel individuals to adopt new ways of thinking and new forms of behavior. Nowhere is this more evident than in the change that occurs within family systems as older practices no longer seem to have the same cultural grip that they once had. One only has to think about how many people have begun to eschew formal marriage today in the West, adopting social practices such as cohabitation or single parenthood or gay marriage, that were socially unacceptable, even unthinkable, a half century ago ( Biblarz & Savci, 2010 ; Moore & Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, 2013 ).

In sum, social change is an organic and systemic process that permeates a society and its existing institutions. And at the micro-level of individuals and families, it is received or resisted by the powerful and powerless alike. It will not take precisely the same form in all nations because it is mediated by a nation’s historical experience, its cultural priorities, and existing institutional arrangements ( Cook & Furstenberg, 2002 ). Thus, the process of change will vary, producing both similar and dissimilar responses, depending on existing political/historical experience, cultural, and social arrangements. This is why Billari and Liefbroer (2010) asserted that there can be a convergence to divergence when describing patterns of family change.

Where and When Changes in Family Systems Occur

It should be evident from my previous descriptions of the complex and variegated nature of how changes in family systems occur that new patterns and practices are adopted unevenly both across and within various nations. A major reason why the pattern of change is not uniform is that exposure to both economic and cultural changes differs depending on the specific social contexts in which individuals and their families are embedded. Think, for example, of the vast differences in exposure to these changes that living in a capital city of a developing nation versus in a remote area might mean. This is aptly illustrated by the changes in attitude about marriage now occurring in Vietnam where attitudes about marriage timing, cohabitation, and premarital sex differ widely from countryside to urban environments (Minh & Hong, 2015).

A second source of variability in family system changes is that receptivity to new ideas or practices will vary depending on such factors as age, gender, education, ethnic and religious affiliations, and a host of other conditions. For example, adoption of new methods of contraception, say by young unmarried women, can be a sensitive indicator of what might be called a predisposition to modernity when the logic of having large numbers of children becomes questionable for some in a society but not for others. As I have already noted, there are powerful differences in the stakes of adopting new practices that threaten to undermine the way things have long been done in any developing nation. Any adequate theory purporting to explain family system change must account not only for the total change but also for the variable levels of change within a nation.

Historians of family change in the West have made this point repeatedly in noting that change is uneven in any given nation. Such was the case with Protestants in England during the 16 th century who were more open to changing childrearing practices to emphasize a child’s relationship to God than were Catholics ( Stone, 1977 ). The upper classes also adopted new and different ideas concerning childrearing, owing to religious ideology and education than did the rest of the population. Several centuries ago in Western Europe and the United States, urban residents and young people in general were more receptive to growing preferences for individualism and the rise of sentiment in family relationships than were their rural and older counterparts ( Shorter, 1977 ). Similarly, in the developing world today, some groups will be more welcoming of certain new practices than others, depending on the degree to which they are embedded in certain institutional contexts that reinforce a commitment to existing family patterns. Any adequate theory of family change must account for both where it takes hold and how its spreads within nations. The analysis of big data generated by patterns of media use, for example, is potentially an attractive source of information for investigating how change runs through established and new social networks in the developing world.

In early stages of economic and social development, increasing variability in family behaviors within a developing nation is to be expected as new family patterns such as premarital sexual behavior and marriage delay are adopted unevenly, let’s say between rural and urban areas, the more and less educated, or, for example, among some ethnic groups and not others. Over time, this variability may decline as practices become more widely accepted and diffused. But note how differences in family patterns may also persist for long periods of time. One only has to think about how enduring differences have been observed in Europe between the Northern and Southern nations ( Perelli-Harris, 2014 ), or the continuing variation between family patterns such as cohabitation, family size, or the prevalence of intergenerational households in Northern and Southern Italy ( Gabrielli & Hoem, 2010 ).

Economic Inequality and Family Systems

Adaptation to macro-level changes in the economy or mezzo-level changes that occur within institutions creates new winners and losers in the developing world, as has happened in the past in nations with advanced economies (see www.welfare.org ). I have argued elsewhere that an interaction is occurring between changing family systems and growing economic inequality, which has been a trend in virtually all post-industrial economies and many rapidly developing nations ( Furstenberg, 2011 , 2013 ). It is not difficult to imagine why and how family change is amplified by economic divergence and vice versa. For example, educational attainment can be assumed to weigh more heavily on outcomes in economies that utilize advanced skills and knowledge; access to education, especially higher education, may in turn affect the process of family change ( Esping-Anderson, 2016 ).

In the United States and many nations in Europe, destinies among the well off and the not so well off began to diverge in the latter decades of the 20 th century as the nuclear family became increasingly important as both an agency of socialization and parental management of children ( McLanahan, 2004 ). Family forms, such as whether parents marry or even reside together at the time of birth, birthing procedures, maternal health, breastfeeding, styles of parenting, and different abilities of families to manage and place their children in contexts that promote (or diminish) opportunity have new and perhaps more lasting effects than they might have had in the past. Parents’ influence on school performance appears to be growing in societies where educational attainment has become a more important criterion for success in later life. In rich nations, poorer families and middle-income families have begun to fall behind their wealthier counterparts in promoting their children’s level of schooling ( Lareau, 2011 ). Children receiving less intense socialization and particularly preparation for schooling may have fewer potential paths in life than their more educated counterparts to make it into the middle class.

Nations substantially differ in their commitments to reducing the disparities created in advanced economies through the redistribution of public resources and development of policies that attempt to reduce and offset the powerful early influences on children’s development that are associated with lower social class position. Limited efforts by some nations, such as the United States, to mitigate the potent effects of family patterns of socialization have created substantial gaps in children’s life chances ( Smeeding, 2006 ), which is an evitable result of the great differences in resources and the capabilities of parents in many contemporary societies to place their children in settings that will provide them with the skills and training to enter and succeed in school.

The evidence that social class disparities in family systems are growing globally has not been established despite the fact that inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has grown in all but a few nations over the past several decades ( Bowles, Gintis, & Groves, 2008 ). And there are indications of shifts in family practices, such as marriage and non-marital childbearing, that may be diverging at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in some Western nations, most notably the United States ( Cherlin, 2010 ; Lundberg, Pollak, & Stearns, 2016 ; McLanahan, 2004 ). However, this divergence in family patterns is also evident in some European nations and may be appearing in certain rapidly developing countries in East Asia ( Bernardi & Boertien, 2017 ; Harkonen, 2017 ).

Although certainly occurring elsewhere, evidence for a widening of social class in family behaviors is most apparent in the United States, where over the past 30 years or more, Americans have lost ground in creating conditions that ensure equality of opportunity—an ideal that Americans have long believed is essential to maintaining a just society ( Chetty et al., 2014 ; Corak, 2013 ). Class differences in family patterns have widened on a variety of fronts even as family variations among racial and ethnic groups have shrunk ( Reardon, 2011 ). In fact, I would contend that Americans now have a two-tiered family system—a system where family patterns among rich and poor have begun to diverge even more sharply than they did a half century ago when sociologists first documented considerable variation ( Furstenberg, 2013 ).

At the bottom and increasingly in the middle of U.S. income distribution, marriage is occurring less often before the transition to parenthood ( Lundberg, Pollak, & Stearns, 2016 ). Many births are less likely to be planned and often occur in ephemeral partnerships; a growing number of lower-income couples are having children from more than one union, a pattern that has come to be known as multi-partnered childbearing ( Fomby & Osborne, 2017 ; Guzzo, 2014 ). This emerging trend of couples having children in two or more unions means that parents, fathers in particular, are dividing their investments of time, money, and emotion among their children in multiple households, and many are growing up in households where fathers (and less often mothers) come and go ( Thomson, 2014 ).

Of course, certain benefits could be gained when children can rely on several parent figures, but they are only likely to occur when the parents are deeply invested (spend time, money, and emotion) in the lives of both their biological and non-biological offspring ( Akashi-Ronquest, 2009 ; Henretta, Van Voorhis, & Soldo, 2014 ). Evidence suggests that fathers in these circumstances often lack the resources to meet their parental obligations even if they have the desire to do so ( Berger, Cancian, & Meyer, 2012 ). Presently, little is known about the enduring commitments of parents who do not reside with their biological children and the behaviors of surrogate parents who replace them in the household ( Carlson & Furstenberg, 2006 ; Hans & Coleman, 2009 ). However, most of what is known about the importance of stability, stimulation, and emotional bonds in early life suggests that children’s development may be compromised in conditions where there is a high family flux arising from the absence or replacement of biological parents ( Fomby & Cherlin, 2007 ).

Beyond the form of the family and parenting processes in early life, parents’ ability to channel resources to their children matters both early and later in life. Support by extended family members can sometimes help to mitigate the absence of parental resources. However, research on the flow of intergenerational resources suggests that children from privileged families provide far more assistance to their children and grandchildren than occurs in poor families where resources are in short supply. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor children grows in part because wealthier grandparents are better positioned to help out by providing housing assistance and child support when needed ( Albertini, Kohli & Vojel, 2007 ).

A host of advantages for children are strongly associated with adequate income and education. Just to mention a few, children in privileged families (those whose parents have a college education) live in more desirable neighborhoods with better schools, libraries, and recreation facilities, and in these preferred contexts, they are more likely to have supervised peer relationships with children of other privileged families in preschool and afterschool programs or during the summer ( Lareau, 2011 ; Minh et al., 2017 ; Schneider, Hastings, & LaBriola, 2018 ). Lower-income parents cannot afford these amenities unless the programs are publically funded or subsidized, which for the most part does not happen in most low-income communities in the United States ( Esping-Andersen, 2016 ).

Thus, it is not surprising to discover that substantial differences exist between the better off and less well off in preparation for schooling, and that these initial differences only widen over time because many children enter school systems that are ill-equipped to compensate for the disadvantages of growing up poor ( Alexander et al., 2014 ). A large body of research has documented how stratification in family practices is creating trajectories of disadvantage in middle and later childhood, during adolescence, and, more recently in early adulthood ( Furstenberg, 2011 ).

The reverse image of this cycle of disadvantage occurs when children are born into well-off families in American society. Even before birth, the situations of advantaged families have sharp, positive differences at birth. Childbearing is highly likely to occur within a marital union, where the relationship has often been time-tested ( Upchurch, Lillard, & Panis, 2002 ). Not infrequently, the partners have been cohabitating and enter marriage because they are ready to have children ( Sassler & Miller, 2011 ). Women in higher income groups receive prenatal care more often ( Osterman & Martin, 2018 ); they are less likely to smoke, drink to excess, and more often adhere to healthy diets (Furstenberg, 2010; Pampel, Denney, & Krueger, 2011 ). Thus, children born into privileged families enter life in better health and with parents who are well prepared to keep them healthy and thriving. Their homes and neighborhoods are safer so that children in affluent and educated families are less at risk of having accidents or suffering stressful experiences. Moreover, they have better chances of receiving therapeutic interventions when negative events do occur ( Duncan et al., 1998 ).

Parental socialization practices differ sharply by socioeconomic status in ways that also favor the better off. A long tradition of research by developmental psychologists and family sociologists has shown that better educated and wealthier parents have the resources to instruct their children in ways that prepare them to succeed in school ( Yamamoto & Sonnenschein, 2016 ); moreover, these parents are more confident and skilled in communicating with teachers and school personnel when their child is not doing well ( Ankrum, 2016 ). And, they possess the social capital to help place their offspring in advantageous educational and cultural settings when they are young and when they reach adolescence and early adulthood (Conley, 2001; Lareau, 2011 ).

Research both in the United States and abroad, following the important work of Lareau (2011) , has identified the “concerted cultivation” provided to children by parents with more resources and education. Increasingly, the family has become a “hothouse for development” where parents have become ever more alert to strategies to assist their children from the cradle to career opportunities. These parents probably deploy more psychological, cultural, and social capital than in earlier eras when there was a more laissez-faire or informal approach to childcare and childrearing ( Bianchi, 2011 ).

The United States is something of an outlier in the West when it comes to public services and support for children and families, especially lower-income families. Consequently, the class gradient in these families’ behaviors, such as non-marital and single parenthood, unintended pregnancies, prenatal care, neonatal services, preschool, and afterschool, may be more pronounced than in other English-speaking nations, Europe, and the wealthy nations of Asia. Forms of the family and family practices and processes have not yet been well studied in a cross-national context, much less a global one. However, countries have different tolerances for income inequality and different levels of commitment for public services to address social issues, particularly their impacts on children. Thus, it remains to be seen how much variation in these behaviors by social class exists in different wealthy nations.

A New Research Frontier

Despite widespread acknowledgement that family systems are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, research to understand the process (how and why change occurs) and the direction (adoption of patterns that have become common features of Western systems) of change is still in its infancy. There is growing availability of harmonized data sets that include many Western and some non-Western nations. Researchers have begun to analyze data from studies such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Family Database, Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS), national birth cohort studies, Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its counterparts, Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS), and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), among others. However, there are formidable problems to examining many of the issues that I have mentioned in this paper.

Sample sizes are sometimes too small to permit informative analyses, representativeness remains an issue in many data sets, the number of countries is rarely large enough to support multilevel comparisons, and contextual information on cultural values or public policies is absent. The research community has not yet fixed its sights on understanding how change in family systems occurs, where change takes place, and what features of culture and social structure mediate the direction of change. Most of all, there is a lack information on how public policies mitigate some of the consequences of family system change for individuals and households.

The Penn–Oxford Project on Global Family Change (GFC), which is designed to examine change on a global scale, is well underway. It utilizes data from more than 100 nations by converting national censuses and Demographic and Health Surveys that have been conducted over several decades (see www.dhsprogram.com ). The aim of the GFC team is to convert the sources of information that are cross-sectional into life-course indicators (e.g., whether individuals are in school or not at different ages, whether they have married or have had children by different ages, and so on) that in turn will permit the GFC team to examine the tempo and sequence of family change over time. The GFC team is planning to create macro-level measures that can be appended to the various countries for which data exist to develop life-course indicators of change (Pesando & the GFC team, in press). This will allow examination of the influence, sequence, and order of family changes and the variating macro-level conditions that initiate these changes.

The attention of the GFC team will be on indicators of changing family patterns in the early part of the life course: change in the age of school leaving, home leaving, entrance to full-time employment, cohabitation, marriage, and first birth. But the team may also examine these indicators in combination to understand the sequence of family change such as childbearing outside of marriage, years of sexual activity outside of marriage, and the like. The intention is to identify associations between macro-level change (i.e., changes in the economy, cultural values, and technology) and the emergence of new family forms and changes in the process of family formation to examine how, why, and where change is taking place. The team will also be able to investigate whether evidence of emerging class differences in family patterns is occurring with the growth of inequality. By building a data set that contains macro-level data, evidence on changes in public policies, and measures of family change, we will be able to more systematically and rigorously test the web of associations suggesting potential chains of causal influence in processes that occur in family systems with the rise of new economies, technologies, and shifts in cultural priorities and practices.

In this paper, I have explored some of the challenges of examining how and why family systems are changing around the globe. I have discussed longstanding disagreements over the sources of change and why both convergence and divergence in family systems that are moving from agricultural-based to industrial-based economies should be expected. My account builds on the theory of the world’s family systems that William J. Goode (1963) proposed over a half century ago and that has yet to be subject to vigorous empirical examination. However, plans are underway to construct a global database at the University of Pennsylvania containing information that will permit researchers around the globe to map the pace and process of changes in family systems, focusing especially on the transition to adult status.

Throughout the world, the passage to adulthood is generally becoming more protracted and more discretionary. As a consequence, elders, especially men in traditional families, will lose influence over the direction of their children’s lives and the choices they make. The young and females in particular in much of the developing world are increasingly looking to education and employment as the means to personal advancement. This process will generally undermine family authority, although in its early stages, families are likely to continue to exert influence over mate selection in many nations where parental influence on marriage choice has been strong.

These changes are taking place in the context of growing economic inequality that is creating considerable divergences in family practices at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic distribution. Family systems in many nations with advanced economies are witnessing greater stability among the privileged while instability is growing in these same systems among the under-privileged. If not counteracted by public policies aimed at mitigating the impact of these divergent family practices within societies, a hardening of the stratification system that creates ever stronger barriers to social mobility can be expected in the developing world.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge support for this paper through the Global Family Change (GFC) Project ( http://web.sas.upenn.edu/gfc ), which is a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford (Nuffield College), Bocconi University and the Centro de Estudios Demograficos (CED) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Funding for the GFC Project is provided through NSF Grant 1729185 (PIs Kohler & Furstenberg), ERC Grant 694262 (PI Billari), ERC Grant 681546 (PI Monden), the Population Studies Center and the University Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the John Fell Fund and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.” I am indebted to Shannon Crane and Luca Maria Pesando for their helpful comments on the paper.

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• 5. Children’s extracurricular activities
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

For updated data, read our 2023 essay “The Modern American Family.”

Family life is changing. Two-parent households are on the decline in the United States as divorce, remarriage and cohabitation are on the rise. And families are smaller now, both due to the growth of single-parent households and the drop in fertility. Not only are Americans having fewer children, but the circumstances surrounding parenthood have changed. While in the early 1960s babies typically arrived within a marriage , today fully four-in-ten births occur to women who are single or living with a non-marital partner. At the same time that family structures have transformed, so has the role of mothers in the workplace – and in the home. As more moms have entered the labor force, more have become breadwinners – in many cases, primary breadwinners – in their families.

As a result of these changes, there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S. Parents today are raising their children against a backdrop of increasingly diverse and, for many, constantly evolving family forms. By contrast, in 1960, the height of the post-World War II baby boom, there was one dominant family form. At that time 73% of all children were living in a family with two married parents in their first marriage. By 1980, 61% of children were living in this type of family, and today less than half (46%) are. The declining share of children living in what is often deemed a “traditional” family has been largely supplanted by the rising shares of children living with single or cohabiting parents.

Not only has the diversity in family living arrangements increased since the early 1960s, but so has the fluidity of the family. Non-marital cohabitation and divorce, along with the prevalence of remarriage and (non-marital) recoupling in the U.S., make for family structures that in many cases continue to evolve throughout a child’s life. While in the past a child born to a married couple – as most children were – was very likely to grow up in a home with those two parents, this is much less common today, as a child’s living arrangement changes with each adjustment in the relationship status of their parents. For example, one study found that over a three-year period, about three-in-ten (31%) children younger than 6 had experienced a major change in their family or household structure, in the form of parental divorce, separation, marriage, cohabitation or death.

The growing complexity and diversity of families

The share of children living in a two-parent household is at the lowest point in more than half a century: 69% are in this type of family arrangement today, compared with 73% in 2000 and 87% in 1960. And even children living with two parents are more likely to be experiencing a variety of family arrangements due to increases in divorce, remarriage and cohabitation. 3 Today, fully 62% of children live with two married parents – an all-time low. Some 15% are living with parents in a remarriage and 7% are living with parents who are cohabiting. 4 Conversely, the share of children living with one parent stands at 26%, up from 22% in 2000 and just 9% in 1960.

These changes have been driven in part by the fact that Americans today are exiting marriage at higher rates than in the past. Now, about two-thirds (67%) of people younger than 50 who had ever married are still in their first marriage. In comparison, that share was 83% in 1960. 5  And while among men about 76% of first marriages that began in the late 1980s were still intact 10 years later, fully 88% of marriages that began in the late 1950s lasted as long, according to analyses of Census Bureau data. 6

The rise of single-parent families, and changes in two-parent families

Despite the decline over the past half century in children residing with two parents, a majority of kids are still growing up in this type of living arrangement. 7 However, less than half—46%—are living with two parents who are both in their first marriage. This share is down from 61% in 1980 8 and 73% in 1960.

An additional 15% of children are living with two parents, at least one of whom has been married before. This share has remained relatively stable for decades.

In the remainder of two-parent families, the parents are cohabiting but are not married. Today 7% of children are living with cohabiting parents; however a far larger share will experience this kind of living arrangement at some point during their childhood. For instance, estimates suggest that about 39% of children will have had a mother in a cohabiting relationship by the time they turn 12; and by the time they turn 16, almost half (46%) will have experience with their mother cohabiting. In some cases, this will happen because a never-married mother enters into a cohabiting relationship; in other cases, a mother may enter into a cohabiting relationship after a marital breakup.

The decline in children living in two-parent families has been offset by an almost threefold increase in those living with just one parent—typically the mother. 9  Fully one-fourth (26%) of children younger than age 18 are now living with a single parent, up from just 9% in 1960 and 22% in 2000. The share of children living without either parent stands at 5%; most of these children are being raised by grandparents . 10

The majority of white, Hispanic and Asian children are living in two-parent households, while less than half of black children are living in this type of arrangement. Furthermore, at least half of Asian and white children are living with two parents both in their first marriage. The shares of Hispanic and black children living with two parents in their first marriage are much lower.

Asian children are the most likely to be living with both parents—fully 84% are, including 71% who are living with parents who are both in their first marriage. Some 13% of Asian kids are living in a single-parent household, while 11% are living with remarried parents, and just 3% are living with parents who are cohabiting.

Roughly eight-in-ten (78%) white children are living with two parents, including about half (52%) with parents who are both in their first marriage and 19% with two parents in a remarriage; 6% have parents who are cohabiting. About one-in-five (19%) white children are living with a single parent.

Among Hispanic children, two-thirds live with two parents. All told, 43% live with two parents in their first marriage, while 12% are living with parents in a remarriage, and 11% are living with parents who are cohabiting. Some 29% of Hispanic children live with a single parent.

The living arrangements of black children stand in stark contrast to the other major racial and ethnic groups. The majority – 54% – are living with a single parent. Just 38% are living with two parents, including 22% who are living with two parents who are both in their first marriage. Some 9% are living with remarried parents, and 7% are residing with parents who are cohabiting.

Children with at least one college-educated parent are far more likely to be living in a two-parent household, and to be living with two parents in a first marriage, than are kids whose parents are less educated. 11 Fully 88% of children who have at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree or more are living in a two-parent household, including 67% who are living with two parents in their first marriage.

In comparison, some 68% of children who have a parent with some college experience are living in a two-parent household, and just 40% are living with parents who are both in a first marriage. About six-in-ten (59%) children who have a parent with a high school diploma are in a two-parent household, including 33% who are living with parents in their first marriage. Meanwhile, just over half (54%) of children whose parents lack a high school diploma are living in a two-parent household, including 33% whose parents are in their first marriage.

Blended families

According to the most recent data, 16% of children are living in what the Census Bureau terms “blended families” – a household with a stepparent, stepsibling or half-sibling. This share has remained stable since the early 1990s, when reliable data first became available. At that time 15% of kids lived in blended family households. All told, about 8% are living with a stepparent, and 12% are living with stepsiblings or half-siblings. 12

Many, but not all, remarriages involve blended families. 13  According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, six-in-ten (63%) women in remarriages are in blended families, and about half of these remarriages involve stepchildren who live with the remarried couple.

Hispanic, black and white children are equally likely to live in a blended family. About 17% of Hispanic and black kids are living with a stepparent, stepsibling or a half-sibling, as are 15% of white kids. Among Asian children, however, 7% – a far smaller share – are living in blended families. This low share is consistent with the finding that Asian children are more likely than others to be living with two married parents, both of whom are in their first marriage.

The shrinking American family

Fertility in the U.S. has been on the decline since the end of the post-World War II baby boom, resulting in smaller families. In the mid-1970s, a 40% plurality of mothers who had reached the end of their childbearing years had given birth to four or more children. 14  Now, a similar share (41%) of mothers at the end of their childbearing years has had two children, and just 14% have had four or more children. 15

At the same time, the share of mothers ages 40 to 44 who have had only one child has doubled, from 11% in 1976 to 22% today. The share of mothers with three children has remained virtually unchanged at about a quarter.

Women’s increasing educational attainment and labor force participation, and improvements in contraception, not to mention the retreat from marriage, have all likely played a role in shrinking family size .

Family size varies markedly across races and ethnicities. Asian moms have the lowest fertility, and Hispanic mothers have the highest. About 27% of Asian mothers and one-third of white mothers near the end of their childbearing years have had three or more children. Among black mothers at the end of their childbearing years, four-in-ten have had three or more children, as have fully half (50%) of Hispanic mothers.

Similarly, a gap in fertility exists among women with different levels of educational attainment, despite recent increases in the fertility of highly educated women. For example, just 27% of mothers ages 40 to 44 with a post-graduate degree such as a master’s, professional or doctorate degree have borne three or more children, as have 32% of those with a bachelor’s degree. Among mothers in the same age group with a high school diploma or some college, 38% have had three or more kids, while among moms who lack a high school diploma, the majority – 55% – have had three or more children.

The rise of births to unmarried women and multi-partner fertility

Not only are women having fewer children today, but they are having them under different circumstances than in the past. While at one time virtually all births occurred within marriage, these two life events are now far less intertwined. And while people were much more likely to “mate for life” in the past, today a sizable share have children with more than one partner – sometimes within marriage, and sometimes outside of it.

Births to unmarried women

In 1960, just 5% of all births occurred outside of marriage. By 1970, this share had doubled to 11%, and by 2000 fully one-third of births occurred to unmarried women. Non-marital births continued to rise until the mid-2000s, when the share of births to unmarried women stabilized at around 40%. 16

Not all babies born outside of a marriage are necessarily living with just one parent, however. The majority of these births now occur to women who are living with a romantic partner, according to analyses of the National Survey of Family Growth. In fact, over the past 20 years, virtually all of the growth in births outside of marriage has been driven by increases in births to cohabiting women. 17

Researchers have found that, while marriages are less stable than they once were, they remain more stable than cohabiting unions. Past analysis indicates that about one-in-five children born within a marriage will experience the breakup of that marriage by age 9. In comparison, fully half of children born within a cohabiting union will experience the breakup of their parents by the same age. At the same time, children born into cohabiting unions are more likely than those born to single moms to someday live with two married parents. Estimates suggest that 66% will have done so by the time they are 12, compared with 45% of those who were born to unmarried non-cohabiting moms.

The share of births occurring outside of marriage varies markedly across racial and ethnic groups. Among black women, 71% of births are now non-marital, as are about half (53%) of births to Hispanic women. In contrast, 29% of births to white women occur outside of a marriage.

Racial differences in educational attainment explain some, but not all, of the differences in non-marital birth rates.

New mothers who are college-educated are far more likely than less educated moms to be married. In 2014 just 11% of women with a college degree or more who had a baby in the prior year were unmarried. In comparison, this share was about four times as high (43%) for new mothers with some college but no college degree. About half (54%) of those with only a high school diploma were unmarried when they gave birth, as were about six-in-ten (59%) new mothers who lacked a high school diploma.

Multi-partner fertility

Related to non-marital births is what researchers call “ multi-partner fertility .” This measure reflects the share of people who have had biological children with more than one partner, either within or outside of marriage. The increase in divorces, separations, remarriages and serial cohabitations has likely contributed to an increase in multi-partner fertility. Estimates vary, given data limitations, but analysis of longitudinal data indicates that almost 20% of women near the end of their childbearing years have had children by more than one partner, as have about three-in-ten (28%) of those with two or more children. Research indicates that multi-partner fertility is particularly common among blacks, Hispanics, and the less educated.

Parents today: older and better educated

While parents today are far less likely to be married than they were in the past, they are more likely to be older and to have more education.

In 1970, the average new mother was 21 years old. Since that time, that age has risen to 26 years . The rise in maternal age has been driven largely by declines in teen births. Today, 7% of all births occur to women under the age of 20; as recently as 1990 , the share was almost twice as high (13%).

While age at first birth has increased across all major race and ethnic groups, substantial variation persists across these groups. The average first-time mom among whites is now 27 years old. The average age at first birth among blacks and Hispanics is quite a bit younger – 24 years – driven in part by the prevalence of teen pregnancy in these groups. Just 5% of births to whites take place prior to age 20, while this share reaches 11% for non-Hispanic blacks and 10% for Hispanics. On the other end of the spectrum, fully 45% of births to whites are to women ages 30 or older, versus just 31% among blacks and 36% among Hispanics.

Mothers today are also far better educated than they were in the past. While in 1960 just 18% of mothers with infants at home had any college experience, today that share stands at 67%. This trend is driven in large part by dramatic increases in educational attainment for all women. While about half (49%) of women ages 15 to 44 in 1960 lacked a high school diploma, today the largest share of women (61%) has at least some college experience, and just 19% lack a high school diploma.

Mothers moving into the workforce

In addition to the changes in family structure that have occurred over the past several decades, family life has been greatly affected by the movement of more and more mothers into the workforce. This increase in labor force participation is a continuation of a century-long trend ; rates of labor force participation among married women, particularly married white women, have been on the rise since at least the turn of the 20th century. While the labor force participation rates of mothers have more or less leveled off since about 2000, they remain far higher than they were four decades ago.

In 1975, the first year for which data on the labor force participation of mothers are available, less than half of mothers (47%) with children younger than 18 were in the labor force, and about a third of those with children younger than 3 years old were working outside of the home. Those numbers changed rapidly, and, by 2000, 73% of moms were in the labor force. Labor force participation today stands at 70% among all mothers of children younger than 18, and 64% of moms with preschool-aged children. About three-fourths of all employed moms are working full time.

Among mothers with children younger than 18, blacks are the most likely to be in the labor force –about three-fourths are. In comparison, this share is 70% among white mothers. Some 64% of Asian mothers and 62% of Hispanic mother are in the workforce. The relatively high proportions of immigrants in these groups likely contribute to their lower labor force involvement – foreign-born moms are much less likely to be working than their U.S.-born counterparts.

The more education a mother has, the more likely she is to be in the labor force. While about half (49%) of moms who lack a high school diploma are working, this share jumps to 65% for those with a high school diploma. Fully 75% of mothers with some college are working, as are 79% of those with a college degree or more.

Along with their movement into the labor force, women, even more than men, have been attaining higher and higher levels of education. In fact, among married couples today, it is more common for the wife to have more education than the husband, a reversal of previous patterns. These changes, along with the increasing share of single-parent families, mean that more than ever, mothers are playing the role of breadwinner —often the primary breadwinner—within their families.

Today, 40% of families with children under 18 at home include mothers who earn the majority of the family income. 18 This share is up from 11% in 1960 and 34% in 2000. The bulk of these breadwinner moms—8.3 million—are either unmarried or are married and living apart from their spouse. 19 The remaining 4.9 million, who are married and living with their spouse, earn more than their husbands. While families with married breadwinner moms tend to have higher median incomes than married-parent families where the father earns more ($88,000 vs. $84,500), families headed by unmarried mothers have incomes far lower than unmarried father families. In 2014, the median annual income for unmarried mother families was just $24,000.

Breadwinner moms are particularly common in black families, spurred by very high rates of single motherhood. About three-fourths (74%) of black moms are breadwinner moms. Most are unmarried or living apart from their spouse (61%), and the remainder (13%) earn more than their spouse. Among Hispanic moms, 44% are the primary breadwinner; 31% are unmarried, while 12% are married and making more than their husbands. For white mothers, 38% are the primary breadwinners—20% are unmarried moms, and 18% are married and have income higher than that of their spouses. Asian families are less likely to have a woman as the main breadwinner in their families, presumably due to their extremely low rates of single motherhood. Just 11% of Asian moms are unmarried. The share who earn more than their husbands—20%— is somewhat higher than for the other racial and ethnic groups.

The flip side of the movement of mothers into the labor force has been a dramatic decline in the share of mothers who are now stay-at-home moms . Some 29% of all mothers living with children younger than 18 are at home with their children. This marks a modest increase since 1999, when 23% of moms were home with their children, but a long-term decline of about 20 percentage points since the late 1960s when about half of moms were at home.

While the image of “stay-at-home mom” may conjure images of “Leave It to Beaver” or the highly affluent “ opt-out mom ”, the reality of stay-at-home motherhood today is quite different for a large share of families. In roughly three-in-ten of stay-at-home-mom families, either the father is not working or the mother is single or cohabiting. As such, stay-at-home mothers are generally less well off than working mothers in terms of education and income. Some 49% of stay-at-home mothers have at most a high-school diploma compared with 30% among working mothers. And the median household income for families with a stay-at-home mom and a full-time working dad was $55,000 in 2014, roughly half the median income for families in which both parents work full-time ($102,400). 20

• “Parent” here is used to mean an adult parental figure. Except as noted, throughout this chapter a parent may be the biological or adoptive parent, or the spouse or partner of a biological or adoptive parent (i.e., a stepparent). The marital status of the parents alone doesn’t reveal definitively what their relationship is to their children. For instance, if a child is living with two parents, both of whom are in their first marriage: it may be the case that both of those parents are the biological parents of that child; or it may be the case that the mother is the biological parent of that child and that she later entered into her first marriage to the child’s (now) stepfather; or it may be the case that the father is the biological parent of that child and that he entered into his first marriage to the child’s (now) stepmother. ↩
• Any marriage in which at least one of the partners has been married previously is defined as a remarriage. ↩
• While the divorce rate has risen since 1960, the trend in divorce since 1980 is less clear. Stevenson and Wolfers maintain that divorce rates have declined since that time, while Kennedy and Ruggles find that the divorce rate has continued its rise. ↩
• Among women, 73% of marriages that began in the late 1980s lasted for at least 10 years, compared with 87% of those that began in the late 1950s. ↩
• For the purposes of this report, same-sex couples are grouped with other-sex couples. While same-sex parenting and marriage has become more prevalent, estimates suggest that less than 1% of couple households with children are headed by same-sex couples; and that, in total, fewer than 130,000 same-sex couples are currently raising children younger than 18. See here for more on the challenges of counting same-sex couples in the U.S. ↩
• Data on the share of parents in their first marriage are not available for 1990 or 2000. ↩
• In 2014, 83% of children living with only one parent were living with their mother, according to the American Community Survey. ↩
• The dramatic changes in kids’ living arrangements in the recent past are in sharp contrast to historical trends , which reveal remarkable stability. From 1880 to around 1970, the share of children living with two parents consistently hovered around 85%, while the share living with a single mother remained in the single digits. Even smaller shares were living with no parent, or with a father only. ↩
• Parental education is based on the highest educational attainment of coresident parents. So if a child lives with both parents, and the father has a bachelor’s degree, and the mother has a high school diploma, that child is classified as having a parent with a bachelor’s degree. A child living with a single parent is classified based on that parent’s education. The 5% of children who are not living with their parents are excluded from this analysis. ↩
• These data are based on self-reports. It may be the case that some families that began as stepfamilies may no longer identify as such, if the stepparent went on to adopt the children. And, of course, many families may be “blended” but may not include parents who are formally married; those families are likely not captured in this measure. ↩
• While blended families all involve remarriage, not all remarriages produce blended families. Remarriages involving spouses who have no children from prior relationships would not create blended families. ↩
• Women at the end of their childbearing years are often defined as those ages 40-44. While it is still possible to have children beyond this point, about 99.8% of babies are born to women younger than 45, and 97% are born to women younger than 40. Women who reached the end of their childbearing years in the mid-1970s came of age during the height of the post-World War II baby boom, a period typified by unusually high fertility. ↩
• While they are not included in this analysis due to data limitations, many women who do not bear children are indeed mothers—either adoptive mothers or stepmothers. ↩
• Preliminary 2014 data indicate that the share of non-marital births declined slightly for the first time in almost 20 years, due largely to changes in age composition among childbearing-aged women. ↩
• Given the limitations of data regarding the fertility of men , the focus here is on fertility of women. ↩
• Only families where the mother or father is the household head are included in the analysis of breadwinner moms. ↩
• For the remainder of this chapter, “unmarried mothers” refers to those who are not married, or who are married but living apart from their spouse. ↩
• The vast majority of stay-at-home parents are indeed mothers, but a growing share of fathers are joining the ranks, as well. In 2012, 16% of stay-at-home parents were dads, up from 10% in 1989. Like stay-at-home mothers, stay-at-home dads tend to be less well off than their working counterparts; they are far more likely to lack a high school diploma (22% vs. 10%), and far more likely to be living in poverty (47% vs. 8%). ↩

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Emerging Trends and Enduring Patterns in American Family Life

February 9, 2022 | Daniel A. Cox

Acknowledgments

The Survey Center on American Life of the American Enterprise Institute is grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for its generous support of the American National Family Life Survey.

In addition, the authors would like to thank Beatrice Lee, Dana Popky, and Grace Burns for their research assistance and support with the design of the report figures; Sarah Burns and Josh Delk for their strategic insights and communications support; Abigail Guidera for her detailed oversight and administrative assistance; Rachel Hershberger for her careful and efficient editing; and Danielle Curran and Jennifer Morretta for their design and aesthetic expertise.

Executive Summary

American family life has profoundly changed over the past half century. The marriage rate is falling, women are having fewer children, and many Americans, young adults in particular, are rethinking what it means to be a family. But despite these changes, few Americans say the institution of marriage is outdated, and it remains a goal for most single Americans, who express interest in getting married one day.

The institution of marriage is evolving in important ways. Religion, which at one time was at the center of much of American family and married life, has become less prominent. Not only are interfaith unions increasingly common, so are marriages among people who have no religion. For couples married before 1972, roughly eight in 10 (81 percent) share the same faith as their partner, and just 3 percent are in secular marriages. In contrast, just over half (52 percent) of couples married in the past decade are in same-faith marriages, while 16 percent are in secular unions.

Americans still report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship with their spouse, and the social benefits of marriage remain considerable. The overwhelming number of married Americans have a positive view about their relationship with their spouse. Compared to Americans who are unmarried, married Americans are more likely to report that they have a satisfying social life and a larger group of close friends. They also say they are more satisfied with their personal health than their single peers do. Yet men appear to accrue these advantages at somewhat greater rates than women do. There is also a massive perception gap between men and women in the division of household labor. Women are far more likely than men to say they take on the lion’s share of domestic tasks, and mothers in particular say they do this when making decisions regarding their children.

The contours of American family life have changed considerably in recent years, but some of our most important formative influences remain the same. Most Americans report growing up with a sibling, and few experiences have a more unique or enduring impact than sibling relationships. Most Americans with siblings say they had a reasonably close relationship with their brothers and sisters growing up, and middle children notably report the closest relationships. Parental favoritism appears to exert a crucial role in how Americans relate to their siblings and broader feelings of social connection and kinship. Overall, 40 percent of Americans who grew up with siblings report that their parents had a favorite child. Americans who perceived their parents picked favorites feel less close to their siblings and their parents and were more likely to report feeling lonely while growing up than those who said their parents had no favorites report.

Introduction

The American family has never been a static institution. Rather, the patterns of family formation and function continue to evolve in response to the emergence of new technologies infiltrating American homes, shifting economic realities, and new cultural attitudes. Today, Americans are marrying later and having smaller families. [1] And more Americans than ever are choosing to elide either.

Despite these shifts in behavior, most young Americans still aspire to get married and have children. Few Americans report that marriage is irrelevant, and many believe that society benefits when its members prioritize having and raising children. However, how Americans think about marriage and child-rearing has changed. In their personal relationships, and even religion, Americans appear to be prioritizing individual preferences to a far greater extent.

Newly married couples are eschewing religious wedding ceremonies that connect them to existing traditions and communities, preferring instead celebrations that reflect their own personal tastes and preferences. The primacy of individual preferences also manifests itself in family life. Fewer Americans growing up today have regular meals with their family, a practice that was routine a generation ago. And Generation Z reports having lonelier childhoods than those born in earlier generations.

But not all changes in family life are exclusively the culmination of shifting personal desires; the loss of faith in formative institutions, rising cost of childcare, and feelings of economic insecurity among young adults may play a role as well. There is evidence that the extensive financial obligation raising children requires is a formidable hurdle for many Americans. Americans who are uncertain about having children cite the cost of doing so as the most important reason they would choose not to do so.

Most Americans continue to be fairly upbeat about marriage—and for good reason. Both married men and women generally feel satisfied with their spouse. In aggregate, both men and women derive considerable benefit from being married. Married Americans have more satisfying social lives and larger social networks and report greater satisfaction in their personal health. Yet men appear to accrue these advantages at somewhat greater rates than women do.

Despite signs of greater parity between men and women in taking on domestic duties, women appear to take on a far greater burden, particularly with decisions regarding children. Women report performing far more of the household chores, including cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. Married mothers are also far more likely to say they are primarily responsible for making health decisions and planning social activities for children. The ongoing tension may be one reason women are much more likely than men to leave their marriage and, after doing so, less likely to get married again.

But despite the many changes and distinct experiences, American family life has enduring qualities. In many families, mothers remain the most important source of personal and emotional support, although there are considerable cross-cultural variations. Our siblings continue to play a crucial role during our formative years and beyond. Parental decisions and behavior can have lifelong influence. Parental favoritism, the notion that parents have a favorite child, has far-reaching negative effects on family dynamics and relationships. And parental divorce continues to disrupt American family life.

Optimism About America’s Future

After nearly two years of life under a pandemic, economic upheaval, social disconnection, and political turmoil following the 2020 election, most Americans do not feel overly optimistic about how things are going in the country. Less than half of Americans report feeling very (6 percent) or somewhat (41 percent) optimistic about the country’s future. More than half (53 percent) say they feel pessimistic about where the country is headed.

There are massive racial differences in feelings of optimism about the country’s future. White Americans are far more pessimistic about the future than Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are. Black Americans are among the most optimistic about the direction the US is headed. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Black Americans report feeling at least somewhat optimistic, as do 59 percent of Asian Americans and 55 percent of Hispanics. Only 41 percent of White Americans share this feeling of optimism about the future of the country. Six in 10 (60 percent) White Americans report feeling pessimistic.

No group expresses greater pessimism about the future of the country than White evangelical Protestants. Only one in three (33 percent) White evangelical Protestants say they feel at least somewhat optimistic about America’s future, while two-thirds (66 percent) feel pessimistic.

Short-Term Pessimists vs. Long-View Optimists

In thinking about the country’s trajectory, far more Americans believe things are getting worse rather than getting better. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans say things in the US have mostly been getting worse, while 26 percent say that things in the country have generally been improving.

Optimists and pessimists think differently about how the country has changed. Americans who are optimistic about how things are going generally focus on the long arc of history, while those who express pessimism are more focused on recent events. The vast majority (90 percent) of Americans who say things are generally getting better in the US say this is happening slowly over time. Conversely, the majority (61 percent) of those who say things have been getting worse believe it is happening very quickly.

Community Satisfaction

Despite widespread negative views about the state of the country and its future, Americans are largely satisfied with how things are going in their own communities. More than eight in 10 (87 percent) Americans report feeling at least somewhat satisfied about the quality of life in their local community, although less than half (45 percent) say they feel very or completely satisfied. Only 14 percent of the public say they are not satisfied with the quality of life in their community.

Marriage, Children, and Family Life

The structure of American family life has undergone profound changes over the past half century. The nuclear family, which at one point served as the unchallenged cultural ideal, has slowly been replaced with a more diverse set of social arrangements. [2] While there was no one cause for this shift, a number of cultural, economic, and social changes helped bring about the rise of a more varied family structure.

First, there is the rise of single-parent households. A generation ago, the overwhelming majority of children were raised in two-parent households, but fewer children are raised in this type of household today. [3] Divorce and remarriage have become much more common even as the divorce rate peaked several decades ago. [4] Four in 10 (40 percent) marriages end in divorce, and remarriage is common, particularly among men, which frequently results in the creation of blended families. [5] As a recent report by the Pew Research Center notes, “As a result of these changes, there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.” [6]

One of the most important changes in American family life has likely been brought about by the decline in marriage. Over the past several decades, the marriage rate in the US has plummeted. According to an analysis from Pew Research Center, just over half (53 percent) of 25- to 54-year-olds are married—a 14 percentage point drop since 1990. [7]

Attitudes About Marriage

Despite waning participation, few Americans believe that marriage is irrelevant today. Only about one in four (26 percent) Americans believe marriage has become old-fashioned and out-of-date. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of the public disagree.

What’s more, these views are widely shared among the public. Although young adults today are less likely to be married than previous generations at their age were, their views of marriage roughly mirror those of the public overall. [8] Seventy-one percent of young adults (age 18 to 29) reject the notion that marriage has become old-fashioned and irrelevant—a view shared by 77 percent of seniors (age 65 and older). Views are consistent among men and women as well. Nearly identical numbers of men (73 percent) and women (74 percent) reject the idea that marriage has become a dated institution.

Perhaps due to the historic association between marriage and religion, religiously unaffiliated Americans are among the most likely to believe marriage is old-fashioned and out-of-date. Thirty-six percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans believe marriage is an outmoded institution. This view is far less common among religious Americans. For instance, less than one in five Mormons (15 percent), Jews (15 percent), and White evangelical Protestants (14 percent) say marriage is out-of-date.

Single Americans Are Not Sold on Marriage

Despite a widely held belief that marriage is still a relevant institution in American society, many of those who have never been married remain skeptical or ambivalent about getting married themselves. More than one-third (34 percent) of Americans who have never been married say they have no intention of ever doing so. Roughly two-thirds (65 percent) of unmarried Americans report that they would be interested in getting married at some point in their lives.

There is even less interest in marriage among Americans who are single and have never been married—those not currently in a committed romantic relationship or living with a partner. Sixty-one percent of singles say they would be interested in getting married someday. Perhaps because marriage is difficult to think about in the abstract, Americans who are currently in relationships are much more likely to express an interest in getting married. Roughly three-quarters (76 percent) of those who are in a relationship but have never been married say they want to get married someday.

Among single Americans, interest in marriage varies surprisingly little. Single Americans without a college education are about as likely to express an interest in marriage as those who graduated with a four-year degree (61 percent vs. 60 percent, respectively). Single men (60 percent) and women (62 percent) also report nearly equal interest in marriage. The one exception to this pattern is religion. Only half (50 percent) of religiously unaffiliated singles report being interested in getting married someday, compared to two-thirds (66 percent) of Christian singles.

Interest in marriage among Americans who have never been married also appears to diminish with age. While about three-quarters (76 percent) of young singles (age 18-29) report that they would like to get married one day, this aspiration is shared by fewer 30- to 49-year-olds (56 percent) and singles age 50 or older (39 percent).

Societal and Family Pressure

Few Americans say they feel pressured by society to get married. Among Americans who are currently single and have never been married, only 29 percent report they feel pressure from society to get married. Looking back, married Americans are about as likely to say the same, with 31 percent reporting that they felt pressure from society to get married. However, there is a notable gender difference among Americans who are already married in the amount of pressure they felt. Married women are more likely than married men to report feeling societal pressure (36 percent vs. 24 percent, respectively).

Americans report facing even less pressure from their families. Less than one in five (19 percent) Americans who have never been married, including similar numbers of women (21 percent) and men (18 percent), say they have experienced at least some pressure from family members to get married. The vast majority (80 percent) of adults who have never been married report they have not.

Disparities in Domestic Labor

A long-standing source of tension in many households is the division of household labor. There is a massive perception gap, with women far more likely than men to say they are engaged in a variety of domestic activities, such as cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry.

Among women who are currently married or living with their partner, a majority say they clean the house (65 percent), do the laundry (67 percent), or cook meals (63 percent) more often than their spouse or partner does. But differential perceptions of labor are not just limited to everyday chores. Women are more than twice as likely as men to report that they plan social activities and outings more often than their spouses do (51 percent vs. 18 percent). Men and women are about equally likely to say they usually pay bills and track household spending (52 percent vs. 54 percent), and in most households, both men (68 percent) and women (63 percent) say that their spouse or partner puts in equal effort in solving relationship problems, rather than leaving it primarily to one person. The only activities men report doing more of than their partners are yardwork and home repairs. Seventy percent of men say they do this type of work more often than their spouse does, compared to 14 percent of women who say they do this more often.

The disparity in domestic workload is particularly acute among families with children living at home. Mothers report being much more involved than fathers in activities relating to their children’s health, whether it includes scheduling doctor’s appointments or making health decisions for children. Seventy-nine percent of mothers say they are more often scheduling doctor’s appointments or making health decisions for children. Only 17 percent of fathers say they engage in these activities more often than their spouse or partner does. Mothers are also far more likely to take on scheduling responsibilities for their children. Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) mothers say scheduling playdates and coordinating social activities for their children are activities they do more often than their spouse does. Only 11 percent of fathers say the same.

Household Labor and Relationship Satisfaction

It would be understandable if perceptions of unequal household labor resulted in lower levels of relationship satisfaction. However, the story is more complicated. For the most part, women who say they take on the lion’s share of domestic duties are not any less satisfied with their relationship. Women who report doing much more of the laundry and cleaning than their spouse or partner report being about as their relationship as other women. What’s more, this pattern holds regardless of women’s employment status.

Cooking appears to be the outlier in domestic duties. Women who report that they do more of the cooking report being less satisfied in their relationship than women who say this work is more evenly divided or a task their spouse does more often. Sixty-six percent of women who report that they do much more of the cooking say they are satisfied with their relationship, compared to 75 percent of other women. Similarly, women who do most of the yardwork and home repairs are much less satisfied with their relationship than other women are (51 percent vs. 71 percent).

For men, the relationship between division of household labor and relationship satisfaction is somewhat different. Men who report doing much more of the cooking and laundry are not any more satisfied than other men are. However, men who report doing much more of the house cleaning are significantly less satisfied in their relationships than men who say their spouse does this type of work more often or they do it roughly equally (65 percent vs. 79 percent).

Religious, Secular, and Interreligious Marriages

The American religious landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past several decades. The number of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated has increased nearly sixfold over the past three decades, and Christian identity has plummeted. [9] The number of Americans belonging to non-Christian traditions, while modest in comparison, has risen dramatically.

These changes have profoundly affected the religious character of American marriages. Today, a majority (59 percent) of married Americans report having a spouse with the same religious affiliation. [10] More than one-quarter of married Americans are in an interfaith marriage (14 percent)—a union between people who have different religious traditions—or a religious-secular marriage (14 percent), in which one person identifies with a religious tradition and the other does not. Secular marriages, in which both people are religiously unaffiliated, have become increasingly common; 12 percent of marriages are among people who are both not religious.

Fifty years ago, same-faith marriages dominated the religious landscape. Over eight in 10 (81 percent) couples married before 1972 share the same religious affiliation with their spouse. More recent marriages reveal a distinctly different pattern. Among Americans married in the past decade, just over half (52 percent) are among couples who belong to the same religious tradition. More recent marriages are also far more likely to be among couples who are both secular. Only 3 percent of couples married before 1972 are in secular marriages, compared to 16 percent of couples married in the past decade.

No religious group is more likely to marry within their faith tradition than Mormons. Nearly nine in 10 (87 percent) Mormons report their spouse is also Mormon. Rates of religious homogamy are also high among Protestant religious traditions. Eighty-three percent of evangelical Protestants and about seven in 10 (72 percent) mainline Protestants report having a spouse of the same religion. A majority of Catholics (65 percent) and Jews (59 percent) also say their spouse shares their religious affiliation.

One of the most important shifts in American marriages is the rise of secular unions—marriages between couples who are not religious. Roughly six in 10 (62 percent) unaffiliated Americans have spouses who are also unaffiliated. This represents a dramatic increase from previous generations. In the 1970s, only 37 percent of Americans who were religiously unaffiliated reported having a secular spouse.

How Religious, Secular, and Interreligious Marriages Affect Belief, Belonging, and Behavior

Although interfaith unions have become more common, they are associated with overall lower levels of religious commitment. Americans in religiously mixed marriages demonstrate less religious engagement than those in same-religion relationships.

Americans in religiously mixed marriages are far less likely to attend services regularly than those married to someone who has the same religious commitments. Forty-four percent of Americans with a spouse who shares their religious affiliation attend services at least once a week. In contrast, 16 percent of Americans in interfaith marriages attend formal worships services weekly or more often, while just 1 percent of Americans in secular marriages—in which neither person identifies with a religious tradition—report attending weekly services. More than eight in 10 (81 percent) Americans in secular marriages say they never attend religious services.

Formal religious membership is also less common among those in interfaith marriages. A majority (61 percent) of Americans with a spouse who shares their religious affiliation say they are a member of a church or religious organization, compared to roughly a third (36 percent) of religious Americans whose spouse has a different religious background. Similarly, more Americans in religiously homogenous marriages (30 percent) say they are members of a prayer or bible study group, compared to 12 percent of religious Americans in interfaith marriages.

However, religious Americans in interfaith marriages are not much more likely to express religious doubts. Only 19 percent of religious Americans in religiously mixed marriages and 13 percent of those married to someone who shares their religion report they sometimes doubt whether God exists.

One possible explanation for the discrepancy in religious involvement is that people who enter interfaith relationships simply care about religion less. As a result, Americans in religiously mixed marriages may not have prioritized religious compatibility when selecting a spouse. However, the formative religious experiences—which strongly predict adult religiosity—of Americans in interfaith marriages and those in same-religion marriages are similar. For instance, equal numbers of religious Americans married to someone who shares their religion (58 percent) and those whose spouse has a different religious background (58 percent) say they attended worship services at least once a week growing up. The two groups also have comparable levels of formative religious engagement when it comes to participating in religious education programs during their childhood.

Marriage Ceremonies and Marital Satisfaction

Religious marriage ceremonies were once the norm in the US, but they have become increasingly less common. Among Americans who are married today, less than half (46 percent) say they were married by a religious leader in a church or other religious setting. Sixteen percent say they were married by a religious leader in a secular setting, and more than one-third (36 percent) report having an entirely secular service—taking place in a nonreligious setting and officiated by a nonreligious figure, either a justice of the peace, friend, or family member.

More recent marriages are much more likely to take place in secular settings and be officiated by nonreligious figures. Only 30 percent of Americans who were married within the past decade report having their ceremony in a church, house of worship, or other religious location and officiated by a religious leader. In stark contrast, more than seven in 10 (72 percent) Americans who were married at least 40 years ago report having an entirely religious service—at a religious location and with a religious leader presiding. Nearly half (49 percent) of marriages that took place within the past decade were secular services.

In part, the rise of secular marriage ceremonies is likely explained by the increasing number of secular couples getting married. A majority (58 percent) of Americans who say their partner shares their religious affiliation were married by a religious leader in a religious setting. Thirty-seven percent of Americans in interfaith marriages also describe the setting this way, but only 19 percent of secular couples opt for a religious service. More than six in 10 secular marriages took place in a nonreligious setting and were officiated by a justice of the peace (41 percent) or friend or family member (22 percent).

Overall, most Americans express a high degree of marital satisfaction, regardless of their spouse’s religious identity. However, secular couples are less likely to say they are completely satisfied. Forty-four percent of religious Americans whose spouse shares the same religion say they are completely satisfied with their relationship, compared to 32 percent of unaffiliated Americans who have a nonreligious spouse. Intriguingly, religious Americans who are married to someone who is not religious are far more likely to report being completely satisfied with their relationship than are nonreligious Americans who have a religious spouse (47 percent vs. 28 percent, respectively).

Politically Mixed Marriages

While interfaith marriages in the United States are on the rise, politically mixed marriages remain uncommon. One in five (20 percent) Americans have a spouse whose political affiliation differs from their own. [11] The vast majority (80 percent) of Americans are married to people who share their same basic political orientation.

The degree of political diversity in marriages is nearly identical among Democrats and Republicans. Only 17 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans report having a spouse who has a political identity different from their own. In contrast, about four in 10 (39 percent) political independents say their spouse has a political identity different from theirs.

Americans who identify as politically moderate are also more likely to have marriages that cross the political aisle. Moderates (28 percent) are twice as likely as both liberals (14 percent) and conservatives (14 percent) to report their spouse’s political identity is distinct.

Unlike interfaith marriages, which have become more common in recent years, the prevalence of politically mixed marriages is more stable. Thirteen percent of couples married before 1972 have dissimilar political affiliations, compared to 21 percent of those married in the past decade.

Marital Satisfaction

Having a spouse who does not share the same political orientation may lead to somewhat reduced feelings of relationship satisfaction. Republicans in mixed marriages are less likely to be very or completely satisfied in their relationship than are those married to people aligned with their politics (86 percent vs. 75 percent). There is a more pronounced gap in feeling completely satisfied. Republicans married to politically similar spouses are much more likely than those in politically mixed marriages to say they feel completely satisfied with their relationship (49 percent vs. 34 percent). Democrats married to someone who shares their politics also report greater relationship satisfaction; 74 percent of Democrats whose spouse has similar political views say they are very or completely satisfied, compared to 67 percent in politically mixed marriages.

Politically Mixed Marriages and Moderation

Being in a politically mixed marriage is associated with having less extreme political views and partisan hostility. Two-thirds (66 percent) of Democrats with a Democratic spouse say they have a very unfavorable view of the Republican Party, compared to 34 percent of Democrats in mixed marriages. Similarly, three-quarters (73 percent) of Republicans in politically homogenous marriages say they have a very unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, while less than half (46 percent) of those who have a spouse who does not share the same politics have a very negative view of the Democratic Party.

Politically mixed marriages may also soften Republicans’ views of opposing party leadership. Republicans married to other Republicans express a much more negative opinion of Joe Biden than those whose spouses have somewhat different political views (82 percent vs. 54 percent, respectively). Notably, for Democrats, negative views of Donald Trump appear to transcend marital influence. Democrats in mixed marriages are not much less likely than those in politically aligned marriages to say they have a very unfavorable view of Trump (73 percent vs. 87 percent).

Divorce, Remarriage, and the Benefits of Marriage

In the US today, divorce remains an all-too-common destination for many marriages. Forty percent of Americans who were ever married report having gotten a divorce. However, the divorce rate, which peaked in the early 1980s, has gradually declined ever since.

Consistent with recent published work, divorce is more common among Americans without a college education. [12] Among Americans who have ever been married, 30 percent of those with a college degree report they have ever been divorced. Forty-six percent of Americans without a college degree say the same.

There is little evidence that religiosity leads to lower rates of divorce. Among Americans who have ever gotten married, rates of divorce are fairly similar across religious traditions. About four in 10 (41 percent) religiously unaffiliated Americans have gotten divorced, similar to the rate of White Catholics (35 percent), Jewish Americans (37 percent), White evangelical Protestants (37 percent), and Hispanic Catholics (39 percent). White mainline Protestants (44 percent) and Black Protestants (50 percent) report somewhat higher divorce rates than other religious traditions. Mormons stand out for their relatively low rates of divorce; only 27 percent of Mormons who were ever married have gotten divorced. 

Women continue to initiate divorces at far higher rates than men do. Although a majority of Americans who have gone through a divorce perceive that they were the ones pushing for it, women report making the decision much more frequently than men do. Two-thirds (66 percent) of divorced women say it was their decision to end the marriage. Twelve percent say their former spouse made the decision, and about one in five (21 percent) say the decision was made jointly. Among divorced men, only 39 percent say it was their decision, while most say it was either their former partner’s decision (31 percent) or the decision was made jointly (30 percent).

For women, higher income appears to increase the likelihood of initiating divorce. Over three-quarters (77 percent) of women making over $100,000 a year say they decided to divorce. Although still making up a majority, women making less than $25,000 are roughly 10 percentage points less likely (68 percent) to say they initiated their divorce. Income appears to play an opposite role for men, with wealthier men less likely to seek divorce than men with lower incomes are.

Ending a marriage can be emotionally difficult, financially costly, and socially disruptive. Despite this, few Americans who have gone through the process express regret. Nearly nine in 10 (88 percent) Americans who have been divorced report that they feel they are better off than they would have been if they stayed married. Eleven percent say things would be better for them if they had remained married.

Does Parental Divorce Increase the Likelihood of Failed Marriages? There is little evidence that being raised by divorced parents greatly increases one’s likelihood of divorce or reduces one’s interest in marriage. Americans who report their parents were divorced during most of their childhood are slightly more likely to get divorced themselves compared to those whose parents remained married (45 percent vs. 39 percent). Further, unmarried adults under age 40 who were raised by married parents express nearly identical interest in marriage as those raised by parents who were divorced do (76 percent vs. 75 percent). Finally, controlling for demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, educational background, household income, gender, and religious affiliation, the marital status of parents is not a significant predictor of marriage interest or divorce rates.

Relationships, Remarriage, and Marital Benefits.

Perhaps because men are more likely to experience involuntary divorce, or at least a marital dissolution that they were less involved in initiating, men are far more likely to get remarried. Among Americans who have ever gotten divorced, men are much more likely than women to be remarried (51 percent vs. 33 percent). What’s more, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of women who have gotten a divorce and are now single express no interest in marrying again.

Compared to men, women who have gone through a divorce are less likely than men to reenter a romantic relationship. Forty-four percent of women who have been divorced and who have not remarried report they are single, compared to 27 percent of men.

Who Benefits More from Marriage?

Another possible explanation for why men are less likely to initiate divorce and are more likely to remarry is that they seem to benefit more from the arrangement than women do. Married men are far more likely than single men to report being very or completely satisfied with their social lives (52 percent vs. 30 percent). [13] They also have a larger number of close friends; single men are three times as likely as married men to say they have no close friends (15 percent vs. 5 percent). Married men report being more satisfied with their personal health than single men do (49 percent vs. 34 percent). Finally, married men are far less likely to report feeling lonely or socially isolated than single men are. Married men (56 percent) are more than twice as likely as single men (25 percent) to say they hardly ever or never feel lonely or isolated from the people around them.

Women benefit from marriage as well, but their relative gains are more modest. Less than half of married women (48 percent) report being very or completely satisfied with their social life, compared to 33 percent of single women. Forty-six percent of married women are satisfied with their personal health, compared to 35 percent of single women. There is also a more modest gap in feelings of loneliness. Nearly half (48 percent) of married women report they do not feel lonely or socially isolated, while 30 percent of single women say the same.

Behind the Baby Bust

The US birth rate reached a record low in 2020. [14] A recent Brookings Institution report notes that births have been “falling almost continuously for more than a decade.” [15] Evidence shows that the pandemic may have encouraged couples to postpone having children, which may result in a rebound as these challenges and uncertainties recede. But questions remain as to how the experience of the pandemic, and the attendant social and economic challenges, may have permanently altered how Americans think about parenthood and prioritize child-rearing.

Although most Americans have a positive view about marriage, there is considerable skepticism about the societal benefits that marriage and parenthood confer. Overall, roughly six in 10 (62 percent) Americans believe society is just as well off if people have priorities other than getting married and having children. Thirty-seven percent say society benefits when people make marriage and child-rearing priorities.

Younger Americans are least likely to see the societal value in marriage and parenthood. Forty-four percent of seniors (age 65 or older) say a society that prioritizes marriage and child-rearing is better off, while only one-quarter (25 percent) of young adults (age 18 to 29) say the same. Roughly three-quarters (74 percent) of young adults believe society is just as well off if people have other goals.

The generation gap is even larger among men. Senior men are about twice as likely as young men to say that society is better off when marriage and child-rearing are priorities (51 percent vs. 26 percent).

Liberals and conservatives are sharply at odds over the societal importance of family formation. A majority (57 percent) of conservatives believe society is better off when marriage and child-rearing are priorities, a view shared by only 19 percent of liberals.

The generational shift in attitudes cuts across ideology but is far larger among conservatives. Older liberals are somewhat more likely than young liberals to embrace the notion that society benefits when getting married and having children are priorities (23 percent vs. 15 percent). Large majorities of both age groups reject this idea. In contrast, older conservatives are far more likely than young conservatives to believe in the societal benefit of people prioritizing marriage and children (64 percent vs. 37 percent).

Who Does and Does Not Want Children? And Why?

Although young adults are not convinced of the societal benefit of prioritizing family formation, most young people without children still express an interest in starting a family at some point. A majority (56 percent) of young adults without children say they would like to have them someday. Notably, young men (55 percent) are about as likely as young women (58 percent) to express interest in becoming parents.

Younger Americans (age 18 to 39) who are in a relationship are significantly more likely than those who are single to say they want to have children (57 percent vs. 45 percent). It may be that being in a committed relationship makes the prospect of having children feel less abstract. It’s also possible that those who are prioritizing starting a family are more likely to enter a committed relationship.

For young people who are uncertain about having children, one of the most common reasons cited is the cost. Close to one in four (23 percent) younger adults (age 18 to 39) without children who are uncertain about having children say cost is a crucial factor in their thinking. Seventeen percent say they worry they would not be a good parent. About one in four younger adults say having children would be too much work (17 percent) or interfere with their professional or educational goals (9 percent). Ten percent say their decision is based on concerns about climate change, environmental problems, or the state of the world. Less than one in 10 (9 percent) younger adults cite health concerns or age as the primary reason they would choose not to have children.

Marrying Later and Smaller Families

Today, Americans are settling down and starting families later than in generations past. In 2021, the median age for first marriage was 30.4 for men and 28.6 for women. [16] Roughly five decades earlier, in 1972, the median marital age was 20.9 for women and 23.3 for men. The average age of first-time mothers has risen as well. In 2016, the average age of first-time mothers was 26, up from 21 in 1972. [17] Americans who choose to marry later in life and postpone having children may also choose to have smaller families.

Although women who decide to have children later in life are often more emotionally prepared and have greater financial stability, they may also experience more frequent health and fertility challenges. For mothers who considered having more children but ultimately decided against it, age and health issues are the most oft-mentioned reasons. More than four in 10 mothers say they chose not to have another child because they thought they were too old (17 percent) or had a health problem that would make it difficult or impossible to have another child (24 percent). Eighteen percent of mothers say cost was the deciding factor, and 12 percent say their spouse’s lack of interest was the primary reason. Only 2 percent of mothers say the decision not to have more children was due to educational or career goals.

Americans who get married earlier also report having larger families. [18] But this is mostly true for women. Nearly half (48 percent) of women who were married in their teens or early 20s have at least three children. In contrast, only 37 percent of women who were married at age 30 or later say they have at least three children. More than six in 10 (63 percent) women married in their 30s or later report having two or fewer children. This relationship holds even after accounting for other factors that might predict family size, such as religious affiliation, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, and income—but only for women. [19] For men, marital age is not a significant predictor of overall family size once controlling for other demographic characteristics.

The Challenge of Raising Children

Most Americans, even those without children, harbor no illusions about the challenges of raising a child. Using a 10-point scale (with 10 representing “very difficult” and one indicating “very easy”), most (56 percent) Americans say that raising a child to be a good person is at least somewhat difficult—ranking it seven or greater. Fourteen percent say raising a child to be a good person is “very difficult,” the top rating on the scale. Only 20 percent of the public believe child-rearing is easy, ranking it between one and four.

Although most Americans believe raising children is difficult, fewer Americans say child-rearing is more difficult today than they did a couple decades earlier. [20] In 1998, 72 percent of the public said raising children was at least somewhat difficult, rating it seven or greater on an identical 10-point scale.

Americans who perceive raising children to be more difficult express more reservations about having them. Nearly half (47 percent) of Americans without children who perceive it to be easy to raise well-adjusted people (rating it a four or less on the scale) say they want to have children someday. In contrast, among those who say raising children is difficult (a seven or greater), only 28 percent say they are definitely interested in having children.

Few Americans believe it is possible to raise children today without making major personal sacrifices. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of the public believe having children requires making major personal sacrifices. Twenty-three percent say it requires only minor sacrifices, and 4 percent say it requires making no personal sacrifices at all.

Formative Family Experiences

One way in which American family life appears to have changed is in how often and what ways family members spend time together. A generation ago, family meals were routine. Roughly three-quarters of baby boomers (76 percent) and 84 percent of Americans who belong to the silent generation report that they had meals together as a family every day. Fifty-nine percent of Americans who belong to Generation X say they had daily meals with their family. In contrast, less than half of millennials (46 percent) and Generation Z (38 percent) report that growing up they had meals with their family every day.

Younger Americans also report having lonelier childhoods. Thirty-nine percent of Generation Z and 35 percent of millennials report that they felt lonely at least once a week growing up. Twenty-nine percent of Americans who are part of the Generation X cohort also say they felt lonely this often during their childhood. In contrast, only 17 percent of baby boomers and 11 percent of Americans who are part of the silent generation say they felt lonely at least once a week.

American families may also be getting more political. Politics appears to be discussed with more regularity among families today than it was a generation ago. Thirty-eight percent of Americans who belong to Generation Z say they talked about politics in their family at least once or twice a month. Only one-quarter (25 percent) of baby boomers and 20 percent of members of the silent generation say politics was a topic of discussion this often.

Sibling Relationships

Few aspects of childhood have a more unique or enduring impact than sibling relationships. Nearly eight in 10 Americans grew up with at least one sibling, making them a more ubiquitous presence in early life than fathers. [21] But the ubiquity of these relationships belies what is known about their influence. Much of the debate about the influence of siblings has often centered on birth order—whether someone was an eldest, youngest, or middle child. Recent work had discounted the influence that birth order has on personality. [22] Less attention has been devoted to understanding the way having siblings alters childhood experiences and how sibling relationships are themselves affected by family dynamics such as divorce and parental favoritism.

Most Americans with siblings report that they had at least a reasonably close relationship with their brothers and sisters growing up. Roughly eight in 10 Americans with siblings say they had a very close (41 percent) or somewhat close (37 percent) relationship with them. Twenty-two percent report they were not too close or not at all close with their siblings.

Birth order may play a role in the type of relationship siblings have with each other. Middle children are generally more likely to report having a close relationship with their siblings. Nearly half (48 percent) of middle children report having a very close relationship with their siblings, compared to 40 percent of eldest children and 35 percent of youngest children.

But other family dynamics may influence the contours of sibling relationships as well. The marital status of parents during formative years may also play a role in how close siblings feel to one another. Men who grew up with divorced parents report feeling more distant from their siblings compared to men whose parents were married report. Only 29 percent of men whose parents were divorced report having a very close relationship with their siblings growing up, compared to 41 percent of men whose parents were married for most of their childhood. The relationship women have with their siblings does not appear to be affected by parental divorce in the same way.

Although many Americans describe their relationship with their siblings as being at least somewhat close in childhood, only about half (51 percent) report being very or completely satisfied with the current relationship they have with their sibling or siblings. Thirty percent report that they are only somewhat satisfied, and 18 percent report being unsatisfied with their relationship.

Even among Americans who describe their childhood relationship as being very close, only about seven in 10 (69 percent) report being very or completely satisfied with the relationship they have with their siblings as an adult. Among those who describe their formative relationship as being “somewhat close,” less than half (46 percent) report being completely or very satisfied.

There is evidence that parents may play an important role in helping establish strong sibling connections. There is a strong correlation between how satisfied Americans are with the relationship they have with their parents and their siblings. Simply put, Americans who are very or completely satisfied with the relationship they have with their parents are very likely to feel the same about their relationship with their siblings.

Parental Favoritism

Parental favoritism—the perception that there was a favorite child in the family—may be an important factor influencing the quality of sibling relationships.

Many Americans who grew up with siblings believe their parents had a favorite child. Forty percent of Americans who grew up with siblings report that their parents had a favorite child. Sixty percent say they do not believe their parents had a favorite.

Women are more likely than men to perceive parental favoritism among siblings. Close to half (45 percent) of women compared to 35 percent of men say their parents had a favorite child.

Americans raised by divorced parents are more likely to believe their parents had a favorite than are those raised by parents who were married during their formative years. More than half (51 percent) of Americans who report their parents were divorced for most of their childhood believe their parents had a favorite child. Thirty-eight percent of Americans whose parents were married perceived their parents as having a favorite.

Who’s the Favorite?

Men are much more likely than women to report being the family favorite. One-third (33 percent) of men who believe their parents picked favorites say they were the favorite in their family. Less than one-quarter (23 percent) of women believe they were their parents’ favorite.

Youngest children are generally more likely to report that they were their parents’ favorite. This is particularly true of youngest boys. Overall, 38 percent of Americans who are the youngest in their family report they were the favorite, compared to 27 percent of those who were oldest. Middle children are the least likely to say they were a favorite child; only 20 percent believe they were. Forty-four percent of men who were youngest say they were the family favorite. Women who were middle children are least likely to believe they were a favorite child; only 17 percent report that they were.

The Negative Consequences of Favoritism

Past research has shown that parental favoritism can have lasting negative effects on relationships, personal self-esteem, and feelings of social connection. [23] Americans who grew up in families that perceived their parents had a favorite were much less close to their siblings when they were growing up than were those who do not believe their parents had a favorite child. Among those who believe their parents had a favorite child, only 30 percent say they were very close to their siblings growing up. In contrast, nearly half (48 percent) of Americans who were raised in households in which parents did not have a favorite child say they felt very close to their siblings.

But it’s not just sibling relationships that may be affected. Americans are far more likely to report having a positive relationship with their parents when they did not perceive them as having a preferred child. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of Americans who say their parents did not have a favorite child report being very or completely satisfied with the relationship they have or had with their parents. Less than half (47 percent) of Americans who believe their parents had a favorite report being satisfied with their relationship. Even Americans who believe they were the favorite do not report having as close a relationship with their parents as those who say their parents did not have a favorite child. Just 55 percent of favorite children are satisfied with their relationship with their parents.

What’s more, perception of parental favoritism may have an enduring effect on sibling relationships later in life. Even as adults, Americans who perceived that their parents had a favorite child are much less likely to report being satisfied with their sibling relationship than those who believe their parents did not pick favorites report. Fifty-eight percent of Americans who say their parents did not have a favorite child are very or completely satisfied with the relationship they have with their siblings today, compared to 42 percent of those who say their parents had a favorite.

Parental favoritism is also associated with childhood loneliness. Americans who report that their parents had a favorite child are far more likely to report that they felt lonely growing up. Forty percent of Americans who believe their parents had a favorite report feeling lonely at least once a week growing up, compared to 18 percent of those who believe their parents did not.

Being thought of as less preferred is strongly associated with educational expectations as well. More than half (51 percent) of Americans who report they were the favorite in their family say it was expected they would go to a four-year college. Less than one-third (32 percent) of those who say they were not the favorite report it was expected they would attend college.

Birth Order, Only Children, and Childhood Loneliness

Perhaps due to their relatively close relationship to other siblings, middle children report that they felt lonely less often growing up than other Americans report. Less than one-third (30 percent) of middle children report that they felt lonely growing up at least a couple times a month. Thirty-six percent of youngest children and 41 percent of oldest children report having felt lonely this often. Only children report feeling lonely much more frequently. Nearly half (49 percent) say growing up they felt lonely at least once or twice a month.

Women who say they are only children report having felt lonely much more often during their childhood than their male counterparts did. A majority (55 percent) of women who are only children say they felt lonely at least a couple times a month growing up, compared to 42 percent of men who are only children. Nearly three in 10 (29 percent) women who are only children say they felt lonely at least a couple times a week.

Although being an only child is associated with more frequent feelings of childhood loneliness, there is little evidence to suggest these experiences have much bearing on our social lives as adults. Only children report having roughly the same number of close friends as those who grew up with siblings and are just as satisfied with their social lives today.

Despite often feeling lonely growing up, there is some evidence that middle children experience the feeling of being overlooked or forgotten. Middle children are far less likely than their siblings or Americans who were only children to say their family expected them to attend a four-year college. A majority (54 percent) of only children and about half (48 percent) of eldest children report that growing up there was a family expectation that they would go to college. Forty-three percent of youngest children report that it was expected they would attend college, but only 35 percent of middle children say this.

Growing Up, Who Do Americans Turn to for Help? Mothers

When it comes to providing personal and emotional support, no person in Americans’ formative lives is more important than mothers. Forty-one percent of Americans report that growing up, the person they would turn to first when they had a problem was their mother. Twenty-two percent of Americans say they would first turn to a friend when facing a personal problem. Only 8 percent say their father was the person they would go to before anyone else. Eleven percent report that they would go to a sibling, and 6 percent say they had another family member who was their first line of support. More than one in 10 (11 percent) Americans say they did not have anyone they could turn to when they had a problem growing up.

Who Americans first turned to when they experienced a problem growing up varies along the lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and religion. Asian Americans (30 percent) are far less likely to say their mother was the first person they would turn to than Hispanic (39 percent), Black (42 percent), or White Americans (42 percent). In contrast, no group is more likely to turn to their mothers for help during their formative years than Black men. Close to half (46 percent) of Black men say their mother was the first person they would go to when they had a personal problem.

White women (27 percent) are more likely than White men (19 percent) to turn to friends growing up. White men are more than twice as likely as White women to say their father was the first person they would turn to with a problem (12 percent vs. 5 percent, respectively).

For Black and Hispanic women, siblings—especially sisters—seem uniquely important. Seventeen percent of Black women and 15 percent of Hispanic women say they would first turn to a sibling when they had a problem. [24] Asian Americans are most likely to report leaning on a close friend. Twenty-eight percent of Asian Americans say they relied most on a close friend when confronted with a problem.

No group is more likely to rely on their father for support during their childhood than White evangelical men. Seventeen percent of White evangelical men say their father was the person they would turn to first if they had a problem as a child. Only 6 percent of White evangelical women say the same. But White evangelical women are about twice as likely as men to say they would seek out help from a close friend before anyone else (27 percent vs. 14 percent).

Family Estrangement

Although American politics appears more contentious than ever, few Americans report that political differences have harmed their relationship with a family member. Only 11 percent of Americans report that they have stopped talking to a family member because of something they said about government and politics.

However, twice as many Americans report having become estranged from a family member over a disagreement about their personal opinions or beliefs. Twenty-two percent of Americans say they have stopped talking to a family member because their personal beliefs were offensive or hurtful.

Americans who identify as atheist or as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are far more likely to have become estranged from family members than other Americans have. More than one in three (35 percent) atheists and nearly four in 10 (38 percent) gay, lesbian, or bisexual Americans report having ceased talking to a family member because they found their views hurtful or offensive.

About the Author

Daniel A. Cox is a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of the Survey Center on American Life. He specializes in survey research, politics, youth culture and identity, and religion.

Survey Methodology

The survey was designed and conducted by the American Enterprise Institute. Interviews were conducted among a random sample of 5,030 adults (age 18 and older), with oversamples of respondents who identified as belonging to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) and Jewish respondents living in the United States, including all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Interviews were conducted both online using a self-administered design and by telephone using live interviewers. All interviews were conducted among participants using a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the national US adult population run by NORC at the University of Chicago. Interviewing was conducted between November 23 and December 14, 2021.

Weighting was accomplished in two separate stages. First, panel base weights were calculated for every household based on the probability of selection from the NORC National Frame, the sampling frame that is used to sample housing units for AmeriSpeak. [i] Household level weights were then assigned to each eligible adult in every recruited household. In the second stage, sample demographics were balanced to match target population parameters for gender, age, education, race and Hispanic ethnicity, division (US Census definitions), housing type, telephone usage, and religion. The parameter for religious affiliation was derived from the 2020 American National Social Network Survey. The telephone usage parameter came from an analysis of the National Health Interview Survey. All other weighting parameters were derived from an analysis of the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample weighting was accomplished using an iterative proportional fitting (IFP) process that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the results.

The use of survey weights in statistical analyses ensures that the demographic characteristics of the sample closely approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The margin of error for the survey is +/– 1.87 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence. The design effect for the survey is 1.83.

[1] US Census Bureau, “Historical Marital Status Tables,” November 2021, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html ; and Bryan Walsh, “The Great Population Growth Slowdown,” Vox, January 5, 2022, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/1/5/22867184/us-census-population-growth-slowdown-migration-birth-death .

[2] Paul Hemez and Chanell Washington, “Percentage and Number of Children Living with Two Parents Has Dropped Since 1968,” US Census Bureau, April 12, 2021, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/number-of-children-living-only-with-their-mothers-has-doubled-in-past-50-years.html.  

[3] Hemez and Washington, “Percentage and Number of Children Living with Two Parents Has Dropped Since 1968.”

[4] Gretchen Livingston, Kim Parker, and Molly Rohal, “Four-in-Ten Couples Are Saying ‘I Do,’ Again: Growing Number of Adults Have Remarried,” Pew Research Center, November 14, 2014, 8–9, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/11/14/chapter-1-trends-in-remarriage-in-the-u-s/ .

[5] Daniel Cox, “Emerging Trends and Enduring Patterns in American Family Life,” AEI Survey Center on American Life, February 9, 2022, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/emerging-trends-and-enduring-patterns-in-american-family-life/.

The American Community Survey calculates a similar divorce rate, though it uses a slightly different method. According to a recent release, “Among ever-married adults 20 years and over, 34% of women and 33% of men had ever been divorced.” See US Census Bureau, “Number, Timing and Duration of Marriages and Divorces,” press release, April 22, 2021, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/marriages-and-divorces.html .

[6] Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America,” December 17, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/ .

[7] Richard Fry and Kim Parker, “Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/ .

[8] US Census Bureau, “Number, Timing and Duration of Marriages and Divorces.”

[9] See the General Social Survey 1972–2021 data at GSS Data Explorer, website, gssdataexplorer.norc.org.  

[10] Americans were categorized as having a spouse of the same religion if they identified their spouse as having the same religious tradition as themselves (e.g., respondent is Catholic and their spouse is Catholic). In this analysis, evangelical Protestantism and mainline Protestantism are considered distinct religious affiliations. Americans who are married to someone of a different denomination (e.g., Baptist and Methodist) are not defined as being in an interfaith marriage. 

[11] This analysis identifies politically congruent relationships as those between Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with spouses who are Democrats or lean Democrat. Republicans’ relationships are similarly defined.

[12] US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Marriage and Divorce: Patterns by Gender, Race, and Educational Attainment,” October 2013, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/pdf/marriage-and-divorce-patterns-by-gender-race-and-educational-attainment.pdf ; and Eli J. Finkel, “Educated Americans Paved the Way for Divorce—Then Embraced Marriage,” Atlantic , January 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/education-divide-marriage/579688/ .

[13] “Single” is defined in this report as being unmarried, not having a cohabitating partner, and not being in a committed romantic relationship.

[14] Brady E. Hamilton, Joyce A. Martin, and Michelle J. K. Osterman, “Births: Provisional Data for 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, May 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr012-508.pdf.

[15] Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip Levine, “Will Births in the US Rebound? Probably Not.,” Brookings Institution, May 24, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/05/24/will-births-in-the-us-rebound-probably-not/ .

[16] US Census Bureau, “Historical Marital Status Tables,” November 2021, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html . 

[17] Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America,” New York Times , August 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html .

[18] This analysis includes only those who never got divorced and are currently married to their spouse.

[19] These results were based on a Poisson regression model predicting the number of children that women reported having.

[20] Gallup Organization, “Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll # 1998-9807019: Parenting/Politics,” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 1998, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31088350 .

[21] Brian Knop, “One in Six Children Live with a Half Sibling Under 18,” US Census Bureau, January 27, 2020, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/01/more-children-live-with-half-siblings-than-previously-thought.html .

[22] Susan Newman, “Does Your Birth Order Actually Matter?,” Psychology Today , November 17, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201511/does-your-birth-order-actually-matter .

[23] Leah Campbell, “What Happens to Kids When Parents Play Favorites?,” Healthline,April 12, 2019, https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-happens-to-kids-when-parents-play-favorites.

[24] The majority of Americans who said they were most likely to turn to a sibling growing up identified this person as a sister.

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The Changing American Family

During the past 20 years, the American family has undergone a profound transformation. By Herbert S. Klein .

For all the changes in fertility and mortality that Americans have experienced from the colonial period until today, there has been surprisingly little change in the structure of the family until the past quarter century. Until that point, the age of marriage changed from time to time, but only a minority of women never married and births outside marriage were traditionally less than 10 percent of all births.

But this fundamental social institution has changed profoundly since 1980. In fact, if one were to define the most original demographic feature in the post-1980 period in the United States, it would be the changes that were occurring in both families and households for all sections of the national population. The traditional American family has been undergoing profound transformations for all ages, all races, and all ethnic groups. Every aspect of the American family is experiencing change. These include the number of adults who marry, the number of households that are formed by married people, the number of children that are conceived, the economic role of mothers, the number of non-family households, and even the importance of marriage in accounting for total births.

The proportion of persons over 15 years of age who had never married reached historic levels in 2000 when a third of the men and a quarter of the women were listed as never having married. The decline in marriage among whites is occurring at a slower pace than among blacks, but both are experiencing rising trends in unmarried adults. By 2000, 22 percent of adult white women and 42 percent of adult black women had never married. This rise in the ratio of persons never married is also reflected in historical changes in the relation between families and households. Non-family households had always existed as a small share of the total households in the United States, usually made up of elderly persons with no families left. But now they are formed by young adults, many of whom never married, or by older persons who no longer reside with children. Also, the proportion of two-parent households, even in family households with children, is on the decline, as single-parent-plus-children households are on the rise. As late as 1960, at the height of the Baby Boom, married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census of 2000 they accounted for just 53 percent of them, a decline that seems to have continued in the past few years. Non-family households now account for 31 percent of households, and families headed by a single parent with children account for the rest, making up to 27 percent of all such families with children. Black families experienced the fastest decline of dual-parent households; by the end of the century married couples with children accounted for only 4 out of 10 of all black family households with children. But no group was immune to this rising trend of single-parent households.

More older people than ever before are also living alone or without other generations present. Declining mortality and morbidity, the development of Social Security and other retirement benefits, all meant that older persons could financially live alone and were generally healthier and lived longer than in earlier periods. A change in cultural values during the second half of the twentieth century seems to have increased the value of privacy among older adults. In 1910, for example, most widows over 65 years of age lived with their children; only 12 percent lived alone. By 1990, almost 70 percent of such widows were living alone. There was also a major rise in “empty nest” households, with elderly couples no longer having resident children of any age. Extended family arrangements were progressively disappearing for the majority of the population. There were also more couples surviving into old age than ever before, so that by 2000 more than half of the adults over 65 who resided in independent households lived with their spouses. With better health and more income, more elderly persons have the ability and the desire to “buy” their privacy as never before.

Not only have family households been on the decline, as a consequence of the rise of single-person and childless-couple households, but even women giving birth are now having far fewer children, are spacing them further apart, and are ending their fertility at earlier ages than ever before, which has brought fertility levels in the United States to their lowest level in history. In the colonial period the average woman produced more than seven children during the course of her lifetime. Since the 1970s the rate has been under two children for the majority non-Hispanic white population. The national fertility total currently barely reaches its replacement level; fluctuated between 2.0 and 2.1 children per woman over the past quarter century; by 2000 non-Hispanic white women were averaging just 1.8 children. Among all groups it was only the Hispanic women—who are at a total fertility rate of 2.5 children—who are above the replacement level. Even among Hispanic women, it is primarily Mexican-American women, the largest single group, which maintained very high fertility rates. Cuban-American women were close to the non-Hispanic whites, and the Puerto Rican women were closer to the fertility patterns of non-Hispanic black women.

Although the U.S. fertility rate declined to the lowest level in history, single women now make up an increased percentage of those having children. The rapid and very recent rise in births outside marriage means that married women no longer are the exclusive arbiters of fertility. Whereas at mid-century such extramarital births were an insignificant phenomenon, accounting for only 4 percent of all births, by 2000 they accounted for a third of births, and that proportion is rising. Although all groups experienced this change, non-Hispanic whites experienced a slower rise than all other groups. Although some have thought this to be a temporary aberration in historic patterns, the increasing illegitimacy rates in Europe suggest that North America is following modern advanced Western European trends.

In the 1970s, when the issue began to be perceived by the public as one of major concern, it was the teenagers who had the highest rates of births outside marriage, and those births seemed to be rising at the time. But by the end of the century older women’s rates of illegitimacy were highest and rising; those for teenage girls were falling in both relative and absolute numbers. That this increase of births outside marriage was not due to poverty per se can be seen in the fact that the United States was not unique in this new pattern of births and the declining importance of traditional marriage. Other wealthy countries, such as Sweden, have also experienced this trend. Although Sweden in 1950 had fertility patterns comparable to those of the United States, by the end of the century its rate of non-marital births was more than half of all births. Even such Catholic countries as Spain and Portugal had arrived at 16 percent and 22 percent illegitimacy rates, respectively, and France was up to 38 percent by 1996. Thus the belief that this was a temporary or uniquely North American development does not appear to be the case. The factors influencing these trends everywhere in the modern industrial world seem to be the same—late marriages, women increasing their participation in the workforce and thus having higher incomes, and changing beliefs in the importance and necessity of marriage. These changes seem to be affecting all Europe and North America at approximately the same time.

This trend is also reflected in the changing economic role of women even in dual-parent households with children. The traditional family with a single male breadwinner working alone to sustain the family is no longer the norm. By the end of the century, only one in five married couples had just a single male breadwinner working outside the home. Among married couples with children under six years of age, only 36 percent had the mother staying at home with the children and not working, and in families where women had given birth to a child during the previous year, the majority of these mothers at the end of the year were working outside the home—more than half of them in 2000 compared to just under one third in 1967. Not only were more women in the workforce—a ratio that was constantly on the rise through the second half of the century—but the vast majority of married mothers with young children were working outside the home by 2000.

All of these changes are having an impact on U.S. fertility rates. Not only is formal marriage no longer the exclusive arbiter of fertility, but more and more women are reducing the number of children they have. This is not due to women forgoing children. In fact, there has been little change in the number of women going childless, which has remained quite steady for the past 40 years. This decline in fertility is due to the fact that women are deliberately deciding to have fewer children. They are marrying later, thus reducing their marital fertility, they are beginning childbearing at ever later ages, they are spacing their children farther apart, and they are terminating their fertility at earlier ages. Not only did the average age of mothers having their first children rise by 2.7 years from 1960 to 1999, but it rose significantly for every subsequent child being born as well, while the spacing between children also increased. Although the average age of mothers at first birth for the entire population was now 24.9 years, for non-Hispanic white women it was 25.9 years.

Clearly the American family, like all families in the Western industrial countries, is now profoundly different from what it had been in the recorded past. It typically is a household with few children, with both parents working, and with mothers producing their children at ever older ages. At the same time, more adults than ever before are living alone or with unmarried companions and more women than ever before are giving birth out of wedlock. These trends have profoundly changed the American family and are unlikely to be reversed any time soon.

Adapted from chapter 8 of A Population History of the United States, by Herbert S. Klein, published by Cambridge University Press, 2004 (845.353.7500).

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The World Family Map 2019: Mapping Family Change and Child Well-being Outcomes

Institute for family studies, sti continues to support important research into family trends around the globe..

W. Bradford Wilcox, Laurie DeRose and Jason S. Carroll.  World Family Map 2019: Mapping Family Change and Child Well-being Outcomes , Institute for Family Studies, 2019, 97 pp.

This year’s Executive Summary, titled “The Ties that Bind: Is Faith a Global Force for Good or Ill in the Family?” addresses that question by considering the relationship between religion and four key family outcomes: relationship quality, fertility, domestic violence and infidelity, in 11 countries around the globe: Argentina, Australia, Chile, Canada, Colombia, France, Ireland, Mexico, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It uses data from the World Values Survey and the Global Family and Gender Survey.  

Chapter 1 is dedicated to “Faith and Fertility in the 21 st Century,” chapter 2 to “Religion and Relationship Quality,” and Chapter 3 to “Religion, Domestic Violence, and Infidelity.” There is an additional Sidebar titled “The Family that Prays Together Flourishes Together.” And as in every previous edition, the Report includes the World Family Map Indicators: 30 pages of up-to-date data for 49 countries that are home to the majority of the world’s population on 16 indicators of family well-being in four major areas:

• Family Structure : Family structure considers with whom a child lives, including parents and other family members, and the relationships between them. Graphs chart Living arrangements; marriage and cohabitation; total fertility rate; and births outside marriage.  
• Family Socioeconomics:  The economic conditions people experience in childhood can have great influence on their development. The indicators in this section include poverty, undernourishment, parental education and employment, and public benefits for families. Graphs exhibit data on absolute poverty; relative poverty; undernourishment; parental education; parental employment; and public spending on family benefits.  
• Family Process:  Family processes describe how families operate: how family members interact with one another, how often they spend time together, and whether they are satisfied with their family lives. These processes can influence the lives of individual family members, for better or for worse. Charts are presented on family satisfaction and views on household income; parental involvement; and family meals.  
• Family Culture:  The family culture indicators monitor national attitudes and values on family issues. They describe the cultural climate in which children grow up. This section graphs attitudes toward voluntary single-motherhood; attitudes about the need for two parents; support for working mothers; and family trust.

The inaugural edition of the  World Family Map  provided indicators of family well-being worldwide and an essay focusing on family living arrangements and education outcomes. The  2014 edition  provided updated indicators and a new essay focusing on union stability and early childhood health in developing countries, as well as a brief analysis of psychological distress among 9- to 16-year-olds in the European Union, in a supplement titled “Family Structure Across Europe and Children’s Psychological Health.”

In the 2015 edition , the focus was placed on work-family arrangements in a lead essay entitled “No One Best Way: Work, Family and Happiness the World Over.” The 2015 report additionally included a supplement reviewing the division of paid and domestic work among Peruvian couples.

In 2017 , the lead report was titled “The Cohabitation-Go-Round: Cohabitation and Family Inequality across the Globe.” 

Download the Report  in English  or in Spanish.

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Family Change in Global Perspective: How and Why Family Systems Change

• Family Relations 68(3)

• University of Pennsylvania

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